Re: [Usability]toolbar icons/text

[Maciej Stachowiak <mjs noisehavoc org>]

On 09Aug2002 12:23AM (-0500), Seth Nickell wrote:
> 
> With 8-9 toolbar items I think it becomes desirable to have some
> differentiation between "important toolbar items" and "not as important
> toolbar items". This is partly achievable by trying to put the most
> important items further to the left, but I don't know how effective that
> technique will be in many cases (particularly where it may pull items
> out of a logical grouping).

Mac OS X Mail has 8 toolbar items by default (7 buttons, one search
text field) and I've never seen anyone consider it excessive, partly
because the icons look fairly distinct and have clear text labels.

> 
> I definitely prefer the MacOS/X approach of using a very small number of
> toolbar items, but as I stated before I'm not sure its feasible to gain
> support for that at this time. Will Gnumeric, AbiWord, etc be willing to
> strip down to a really small number of toolbar entries? Its almost a
> tradition in office applications (a terrible one, but tradition is hard
> for many people to break) to have giant toolbars. If this is not going
> to happen, I think prioritized text is better than a large number of
> titled icons. You could say I'm trying to cut my losses by pushing for
> prioritized text.

Giant toolbars of unlabelled icons are a crime against humanity. No
one likes scanning through huge lists of tiny extremely
similar-looking icons.

I think you should encourage the office apps to move towards useful
but customizable toolbars. Then the toolbar scales to the number of
items a particular user is ready to handle, rather than putting every
single feature in a new or casual user's face.

> > If the items useful to new users are scattered among unlabelled items
> > that are not useful to new users, then it will be much harder for new
> > users to find what they want, defeating the purpose of the toolbar as
> > a place for important shortcuts.
> 
> I think it would be better than a large number of labled items because
> it helps differentiate the most important items. Also, these items will
> probably not be sprinkled throughout the toolbar but will usually be put
> on the left.

Maybe to you the association "has text label == is important" is
clear, but I doubt it is equally clear to most people. I think a more
typical reaction is "what are these mysterious things without
labels?", rather than "I'll never need to click the thigns without
labels so I can completely ignore them."

> > Incidentally, there are many apps on OS X where I almost never have to
> > open the menus, even though they have relatively few toolbar items.
> 
> Yeah, I think this is fantastic, and I'd love to do this if I can get
> support for it. Its going to take maintainers willing to go at their
> toolbars with an axe (or let me do it ;-) though.

I do think that a nice general customizable toolbar system is an
important corollary to this. Then everyone's favorite gadget can be
in the toolbar without being in the default toolbar.

Is that a goal for 2.2 or 2.4?

 - Maciej