Re: [Usability]question on multiple save as items

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2003-01-14 at 16:54, Brian Bruns wrote:

> The toolbar is icon only

This is a potential issue in itself... if this is a GNOME app, it should
respect the user's preference (set in the Menus & Toolbars Preferences
window) for whether toolbars show icons, text or both.

> , and has the Open, Save, and Save Results As... 
> items on the toolbar (Save Query As... would be a lesser used function 
> normally).

If it's "lesser used", you should probably ask yourself (or better
still, your users) whether it's genuinely useful to have a toolbar
button for it at all.  Toolbar buttons should only be provided for the
most frequently used operations.

If the answer is still "yes", then you probably really don't have much
option but to design two distinct icons for the two "Save As" icons. 
You'd probably want to somehow combine the standard "Save As" icon with
symbols for "query" and "report" respectively... not being a database
user I don't know if there are already common icons for those sorts of
things though :/

I haven't seen a screenshot of your app, but if the window is split into
two with the query at the top and the results at the bottom or
something, another option might be to place the "Save Query" button near
the query display, and the "Save Report" option near the report display,
instead of having them both on the toolbar.  That way you might just
about get away with using the same icon for both, but it kind of depends
on the layout of the window and what else is on the toolbar.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems