Re: [Usability] Mute in GNOME mixer applet does not have correct behavior

[Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org>]

On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 14:33 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-03-18 at 19:57 +0100, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> > Hi,
> > Conclusion
> > ------------
> > What do the usability people think of this??
> 
> stock_volume-0 is the worst icon ever. What exactly does "0" mean, when
> you have your volume set to 24%?

In my proposal the "0" icon is only used for 0%. In the current gnome
mixer applet 2.14.0 the "0" icon is not used anymore. The icon is
defined in the code but due to the logic in the code it will never be
displayed. Your described behavior was present in 2.12 


>  The optimal behavior would be to
> restore the volume to where the user /started/ from, when dragging the
> slider to 0 in the first place, not to restore to it was last set after
> they let go (which would as you point out, in this case, always be 0).

Just a remark: this would give muting another meaning then that people
are used to with normal audio amplifiers and could be tricky to
implement if you use keyboard to control the volume.

> Their should be 4 states only. High, medium, low, and mute. Something
> between low and mute doesn't say anything. The volume-0 icon has no
> audio waves in the icon, but gets used up to 25%, so the user may still
> have quite a bit of audio coming out of the speakers in fact. This seems
> just as confusing to me. How often are people to drag to 0, rather than
> just clicking on mute?

Like I said my proposal does only use the "0" for 0% volume and the
current gnome-mixer-applet does not use the "0" icon. So the case you
are referring to does not exist.

I don't see why the "0" icon is the worst icon ever. I agree if it isn't
used properly like in the case you describe it's not good. That was even
one the reasons that I filed bug [1].

What is the problem of using the "0" icon for 0% volume if the audio is
not muted?

Jaap


[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164925