Re: [Usability]toolbar icons/text

[snickell stanford edu]

I agree with Nils that we shouldn't have "text off".

But... wrt to priority-text vs. text+icons, I see some definite
advantages to priority-text, for new users and more experienced users.

The advantage of priority-text is that it makes sense out of a full
toolbar by highlighting the most relevant items. This is used to good
effect in Evolution, for example, where "Send/Receive mail" and "New
Message" are pulled out where they would otherwise fade into a mess of
toolbar icons.

There are essentially two camps where toolbars are concerned: the "make
it so most users would never have to touch a menu if they didn't want
to" camp exemplified by Microsoft Office and the "make toolbars a
shortcut for the several most common items" camp exemplified by many Mac
OS/X applications. Since I have a feeling most GNOME people wouldn't be
thrilled with the latter (I would, but its hard to convince people to
only have 5 or 6 toolbar items), priority text provides a nifty
compromise. Show the other items but provide a mechanism (the text) for
highlighting the most important items.

The disadvantage of priority text relative to text+icons is obviously
that you don't have immediate text access to all toolbar items. But
since text is probably most relevant to new users of applications, who
are probably going to be most interested in priority-text icons (that
is, if they are chosen well), this may not be such a loss.

In some ways this is a hard problem to judge because we don't have many
readily available "big apps" fully ported to the ways and wiles of GNOME
2 yet. So its hard to tell how effectively application developers will
be choosing priority text and such (actually, I just noticed that this
could be done about a week ago, so I'm going to slip some quick
guidelines in for choosing which items should have priority text into
the HIG which will be released in a couple weeks ;-)

-Seth

Quoting Nils Pedersen <n p sun com>:

> For new users to Gnome, I think its better with text turned on;
> and its fairly easy for the more experienced user to change
> to Icons Only.
> 
> Nils
> 
> Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> > 
> > Should the default toolbar mode be icons-only or "priority" instead
> of
> > with text?
> > 
> > Havoc
> > _______________________________________________
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> > Usability gnome org
> > http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
> > 
> 
> 
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