Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus user testing at MIT

[Robin Jeffries <Robin Jeffries eng sun com>]

Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

|
|To me, this sounds like you (or the previous poster) have 
misunderstood 
|the point of an hourglass pointer. Which, IMO, is to give a visual 
cue 
|that the UI is incapable of processing commands (clicks) *at the 
|position of the cursor* for as long as the hourglass is displayed. 
|Hence, the UI is by definition not usable while the cursor displays 
the 
|hourglass!
|
|>> Again, the reason I like the hourglass is just that it is
|>> a *known* mechanism for informing the huge base of Windoze
|>> users that the OS is launching your application.  Why have
|>> we got to reinvent the wheel? 
|> 
|> Because the window wheel is square, that's why.
|
|Don't be distracted by the way the win9x interface has implemented 
this 
|idea. Instead, take a look at the OS/2 Presentation Manager (plus the 
|Workplace Shell on top of it). The default wait icon is a clock 
instead 
|of an hourglass, but that's not important - the point is that it is 
only 
|displayed when the application _beneath_ the cursor is unable to 
respond 
|to mouseclicks. This could also be the desktop itself, when the OS is 
|very busy performing a task at a given moment.
|

There is nothing more annoying than a busy cursor in an app that is 
still accepting mouse clicks -- I consider that deceptive advertising. 
The reason for the throbber that another poster mentioned is that in a 
web browser, it is still possible to interact with the page while it 
is loading -- the throbber is a progress indicator, not an unavailable 
state indicator.  Don't confuse the two.  

I've recently been thinking a lot about accessibility concerns (access 
for the disabled), and while I in general agree with what Reinout 
says, the use of the mouse pointer for this kind of feedback is 
problematic for the disabled.

The reason for using the mouse pointer to show a busy state is that 
you can be pretty sure that someone using the mouse is attending to 
the pointer, so the information, which needs to be immediately 
available, will be seen by them.  But what about someone who doesn't 
use the mouse?  (Which covers both visually and motor impaired users, 
as well as power users who may not use the mouse much).  They are 
likely to have moved the mouse pointer out of the way and won't see 
the busy indicator.  

For blind users with a screen reader, the screen reader could say 
something like "application/window busy" whenever the user enters a 
window that is displaying a busy mouse pointer, but most keyboard only 
users don't use a screen reader.  More generally, one could provide a 
set of sounds (via the OS) to indicate this.  They would have to sound 
when the busy cursor is turned on or off, whether because of 
starting/stopping an operation or because of navigating to a 
busy/nonbusy window.  I would probably make this redundant with the 
busy cursor.  No current OS does this, so far as I know.

Robin Jeffries