Re: gep-2, Desktop Theme Sets

[textshell neutronstar dyndns org]

On Fri, Aug 30, 2002 at 07:57:17PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> I haven't caught up with the backlog of mail (or the GEP) on this topic
> yet, hopefully I will today.  But so far the Win9x Themes concept sounds
> like the closest to something that might appease everyone-- you load a
> theme, you get a checklist of all the elements it includes, and you can
> opt in or out of as many of them as you wish, saving the result as a new
> theme set if you want to.  
> 

While I'm not a usablity expert, please don't copy that model from Windows. From
my experience users not munging computers all the day are confused by this.
A simple usage case might show the problem:
- The user selects a theme
- He doesn't like the mouse cursor (or mime icons, ...) and deselects that
checkbox
- He applies the new settings or even a new theme
- The 1st Themes mouse cursor still apply, but the users thinks "I told the
computer not to use the cursors from the Theme!".

I think the user has every right to be confused should he bother that the
settings are just a bunch of gconf keys. And not applying a part of the theme is
just leaving that old (in this case crappy) setting as is? I think if the theme
selector allows the exclude some settings from the theme that should reverted to
the default settings or better to the last setting the user manually applied.
The old behavior is IMHO only useful if the user intends to mix designs from
different themes but if we want to make that easy (and not overly confusing) we
had better a UI that lets the user mix themes than expect him to change to each
of the themes he needs parts from while playing with checkboxes!


So either a) don't give any choice which parts of the theme apply (all not
defined revert to sane defaults) b) allow excluding some settings that revert c)
as 'b' but revert the the last manual settings for that option. Maybe provide a
UI to mix different themes.

regards,
	Martin H.

> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
> 
> -- 
> CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
> mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
> http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771
> 
> Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems
> 
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