Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!snorkelwacker!mit-eddie!bu.edu!m2c!umvlsi!dime!sandy From: sandy@scooby.cs.umass.edu (Sandy Wise) Newsgroups: comp.windows.misc Subject: Re: Look and Feel? Or just Look? Message-ID: Date: 22 Feb 90 21:53:17 GMT References: <671@tci.bell-atl.com> <1907@cbnewsi.ATT.COM> <1990Feb14.201536.29437@sq.sq.com> <5348@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> <22607@mimsy.umd.edu> Sender: news@dime.cs.umass.edu Distribution: comp.windows.misc Organization: /u/zoo/sandy/.organization Lines: 110 In-reply-to: don@brillig.umd.edu's message of 18 Feb 90 02:45:48 GMT In article <5348@crdgw1.crd.ge.com> barnett@grymoire.crd.ge.com (Bruce Barnett) writes: >Why do most people measure the "quality" of a window system on such >cosmetic features like 3-D buttons? And don@brillig.umd.edu writes in reply: I have been wondering about this too. Are 3-D buttons any easier to use? Is the 3-D "look" a metaphore or an illusion? That is, does the apparent third dimension effect the "feel" in any way at all? I think the "feel" is much more important than the "look". The 3d look folks will claim that 3d presentation is in fact easier to use based on the semantic feedback provided. A control is evident because it "sticks out" of the work surface. Of course, in Motif, separators are 3d - I guess this is to keep the "look" consistent at the price of the "feel." This does raise an interesting question about how to resolve such conflicts. I suspect it has been resolved in the favor of "look" not because any thought was given to it, but rather that a nice "look" sells product... What amazes me are the people who used to hate Open Look, but now that it's 3-D, they love it. The one part of an interface's "look" that obviously affects the user is that it be unabtrusive. I have not seen OL3d, and have not used OL at all, but looking at the color and B&W screenshots I will note, that the color OL is much less intrusive that the B&W ones. My initial reaction to B&W OL is "it's ugly". Of course, I recall a thread in which Motif was called "Art Deco" and while I like deco, and resent it being used as an insult ;-) I am reminded about the old adage of where beauty lies... > Is the UI easy to use? Does it require any documentation? > Is it intutive? Is it self documenting? Open Look has a "help" key that pops up a magnifying glass window explaining how to use the control under the cursor. The Lisp Machine has a status line at the bottom of the screen that always tells what the mouse buttons and shift keys will do wherever the mouse is pointing -- I like that a whole lot, other user interfaces should have such a feature. Motif skirts the magnifying glass through the help menu item, and a help button on dialog boxes. I have yet to see anyone provide status line stuff. The LM, Explorer, and other lisp enviroments offer it... I suspect this is an example of the comparative maturity of the interfaces... This brings up another issue that I think is more important than the look: how easy is it to customize a particular toolkit? And of course, the flip side - if you support interface customization, what happens to the grand dream of standardization... > How easy it it to keep track of the keyboard focus? > How easy is it to change the focus? Can you choose between click-to-type and focus-follows-cursor, or are you forced to live with one or the other? Motif separates focus and raise into two issues. I also hate click to type, and use focus-follows-pointer but not auto-raise. > Are there any mechanisms to help you keep track of > the state (busy/idle/error) of each application? Open Look dims the title bar to show that a window is busy. The only notification that Motif provides is the "busy cursor" when in the window. The OL spec points out the problems with this approach. > How convenient is the scrollbar? I like the way Open Look scroll bars work. They take up a bit too much space on the screen for my tastes, and I'd like to be able to move them to either edge of the window, though. I don't like objects to warp the pointer, which the scrollbars do, but this is personal taste. The OL scrollbars have an interesting feature in the ability to split viewports. I do have some questions though - if a viewport has both H and V scrollbars, how is screen real estate allocated to make room for the scroll bar? And more important - how are menu actions associated with viewports? If you have click to type - you can set focus, but for focus-follows-pointer this is not clear to me... > Are there accelerators for common actions? Can you redefine them? Motif is very good about this. Everything is supposed to have an keyboard equivalent, and they are supposed to be defined in the configuration files. > Notices/Alerts - do they tell you which application caused the > alert? What happens if two applications alert you at the > same time? Motif associates modal dialogues with the application, so you can use another app. Also, the dialogues are defined to be always within the borders and above the application. This is not as visually informative as the "zoom" effect used by OL, but also saves real estate. -- WISE@cs.umass.EDU Arxin@UMass.BITNET Alexander Erskine Wise Software Development Laboratory Disclaimer: The opinions above are ficticious, any similarity to opinions living or dead is completely co-incidental.