There are at least two ways to prevent users being confused by this feature, without removing it completely:
- Provide a more prominent visual feedback when it's activated, so that if it's by accident the user will understand what happened. Instead of just an instant unexpected change of the complete panel, show a sliding animation over the tabs that brings attention to them and explain that they're being changed. - Guard the feature with a modifier key so that it can't be activated by accident. If you have to use ALT+Scrollwheel to activate this quick scrolling through tabs, it's far less likely that its usage is unintended, and the user will have a clue that something special is happening because of the pressed key. On 12 March 2010 11:35, Allan Day wrote: > Hi Cody, > > > So, I stumbled upon this feature we have where you can use mouse-wheel > > scrolling on GtkNotebook pages to change to a different page. It wasn't > > the most pleasant experience for me since I did it on accident and was > > briefly quite confused. I'm not a usability expert by any stretch of > > the imagination, but my gut feeling is that if something confuses me for > > even a moment then it might be a usability flaw for average users. > > I've been following your thread on desktop-devel... It's a subtle issue. > A few considerations: > > It makes sense that users who do utilise this feature do find it to be > quicker, particularly when they are switching between a large number of > tabs, and it could allow some novel interactions which aren't possible > by other means. > > Though most widgets cannot be controlled through the mouse wheel, a > small number can (combo boxes, volume sliders and the window list, for > example), so it's not completely inconsistent to have this behaviour for > tabs. > > On the other hand, we need to consider the pain that is caused by this > feature. A few questions here: do users simply run into this by > accident, or are there specific scenarios which cause difficulty? Is > this something that users accidentally encounter once and then learn to > avoid, or is it something that they will repeatedly run into? > > Allan > -- > IRC: aday on irc.gnome.org > Blog: http://afaikblog.wordpress.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > Usability mailing list > [email protected] > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability >
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