Re: [Usability] Double-click in notification area?

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinout cs vu nl>]

Daniele,

On Mon, 30 Aug 2004, Daniele Levorato wrote:

> always listening for what the community wants and think... not just what

Are the single-click proponents not part of "the community"?

> gnome developers don't need a single-click policy to demonstarte it...
> won't win the nobel for being the first to really use "single click"
> policy...
> there're many other more important issues...

Personally I find this issue quite important, as I can confirm that I 
can't explain to my mother when to use single and when to use double 
click. Whatever the outcome of this discussion, the inconsistency of 
panel launcher / desktop launcher behaviour *must* be solved.

> Don't confuse optimization with introducing practices that can increase
> accidental errors: from this viewpoint even a "delete file" action is
> optimized if you drop the rmation dialog... but is enough safe?

That's a non-argument, preventing data loss is always of topmost 
importance.

> As already written, sometimes having a click to perform action can
> really cause unwanted actions to be performed... even for example giving
> focus to another window.

Let's introduce focus-follows-mouse as default as well then ;-)
But as someone else pointed out, accidental clicks happen all the time, 
regardless of what default behaviour we choose.

> Finally talking about "optimization" referring to single vs. double
> click seems useless to me... there's a microsecond difference!

A few hundred milliseconds, to be a bit more precise. And this fast 
double click motion is one of the most difficult motions to learn for a 
beginning mouse user, especially if the user isn't very young anymore.

> compelled to use windows" or "Oops, I was doing a DRAG but I had a
> problem with the button and so resulted in an action" or "Oops it was
> the other icon I really wanted to click"...

Doesn't matter as long as the erroneous action can be made undone 
without permanent consequences. You can't design to prevent the user 
from making mistakes, but you can design so that the UI is forgiving of 
mistakes.

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen			student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778