Re: Knob styles (was: AU host properties)
Re: Knob styles (was: AU host properties)
- Subject: Re: Knob styles (was: AU host properties)
- From: Marc Poirier <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 21 May 2003 21:10:12 +0200 (CEST)
>
[ Option 1 is equivalent to a musical slider control whose thumb
>
[ jumps wherever you click. In a window scroll control, this thumb
>
[ behavior would be pretty awful, but for fast music control, it is
>
[ nice to assign a value with a single click, no dragging required.
>
>
Actually, a window scroll control which jumps to the click position is
>
the most efficient and intuitive. Think of a phone book which is a
>
couple of inches thick. When you want to look up Restaurants, you put
>
your thumb somewhere past the middle and open the yellow pages directly
>
to the approximate location. You don't start flipping through the
>
pages from the beginning like some crude animation. :-)
>
>
NeXT Computer did studies of people who had never used computers
>
before, and they overwhelmingly found the click-to-here scrollers more
>
intuitive (when combined with a thumb knob whose size was proportional
>
to the amount of the document being displayed). Unfortunately, this
>
option is hidden as the non-default selection in Mac OS X. I won't
>
get into the other user interface revelations that they discovered and
>
have been lost when Apple took over and took a step back.
>
>
My point here, to return to the topic, is that you should step back
>
from what you're used to in computers every once in a while and try to
>
think outside the box. Sometimes we miss things that are obvious to
>
the uninitiated, and we'd like them better ourselves if we used them
>
day-to-day. It's getting harder and harder to find people who haven't
>
used computers, though, so we much challenge ourselves even more to
>
make computers easier on the physical body and mind.
Hmmm, that's interesting, but I wonder if it's really as informative as
you might think it is upon first consideration. Folks who don't use
computers are not necessarily good test subjects for this stuff. It's
true, they don't have the same preconceptions about normal computer
behavior clouding their minds, but they also don't have any sort of
computer use habits. This example is a good demonstration of that, I
think. I disagree that moving the scrollbar to where you've clicked the
mouse is good behavior. It might be more intuitive to someone first
approaching the control with a fresh mind, but it's inconvenient when you
consider the way that a regular computer user will be using such a
control.
At least in my experience, I use scrollbars mostly either for scrolling
through files in a directory listing or for paging through some document
(PDF, text, RTF, some textual document like that). The vast majority of
the time, I do not want random access to some point in the thing that I'm
scrolling through. I was sequential access. When I'm done with one view,
I want to scroll on to the next view, or the previous view. Because of
this, having the view jump by pages when I click in the open area of the
scrollbar is the most effective and useful behavior. But this is
something that a test subject will only realize after using computers
regularly for some period of time. After reading this message, I tried
the other scrollbar behavior for a while, I tried to "free my mind" of my
prior expectations ;), but I hated it and finally gave up and went back
to the old behavior. 99% of the time, it was just a pain because I wanted
sequential scrolling, so I always found myself slowing dragging the
scrollbar to a good place (so yes, this is a literal pain because it
increases wrist strain a lot!).
The phone book analogy makes sense on its own, but it is not a good
analogy for the stuff that scrollbars usually control in a computer
environment.
Anyway, I think that this applies pretty well to software "knob"
interfaces as well, which is how this discussion began. A brand new
computer user would see a knob and intuitively have the reaction "circular
control, move in circles." But anyone who's used a computer regularly
would get completely fed up with trying to make circular motions with a
mouse, and so in that case as well, I think that a "fresh" perspective on
the interface issue would lead to the more undesirable approach.
But the problems with software "knob" interfaces go deeper than the issue
of circular motions with mice. Even if you allow linear control, the more
ergononic way, they're still a software interface abomination because the
action does not correspond to the view. It makes sense why intuitively
we thing "circular motion" when we see knobs on the screen, it's because
they are circular controls that "move" onscreen in a circular direction.
If you ever learn the very basics of good interface design, you learn that
it's very bad to have the visual representation totally in contradiction
to the tactile control method.
Anyway, here's to a brighter future someday, free of software "knob"
controls...
Marc
_______________________________________________
coreaudio-api mailing list | email@hidden
Help/Unsubscribe/Archives:
http://www.lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/coreaudio-api
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.