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> -----Original Message-----
> From: cellml-tools-developers-bounces at cellml.org [mailto:cellml-tools-
> developers-bounces at cellml.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Miller
> Sent: 12 October 2007 05:26
> To: cellml-tools-developers at cellml.org
> Subject: Re: [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls
> content/util skin
>
> Hi,
>
> I will wait until this change is complete before reviewing the
> implementation in any more detail, but a few comments on the UI design.
> These are issues which we can perhaps fix over time when the support for
> this is established:
>
> 1) The 'I' icon is perhaps not very intuitive, because we don't
> necessarily expect our users to know what 'identity' means in this
> context. Perhaps we want to come up with a more understandable visual
> metaphor that is sufficiently simple to unambiguosly represent in a
> 16x16 image. One option would be log-linear and linear-linear graph paper.

In that context, others icons are not very intuitive to me either, namely
the ones for the different views. If I didn't know what they were for, I
would see myself waiting for the tooltip to come up to find out what they
are for (or click on the button and find out at that point indeed).

Surely, there must at least be one person at the ABI who is very good at
drawing icons?

> 2) Three-way cycling toolbuttons are not ideal from a UI perspective
> because they are not discoverable - when you are looking for how to do
> something like get a log axis or a percent transform, you don't expect
> to click on a button which looks like an 'I'. I would suggest instead
> having all three buttons appear alongside each other with only one
> depressed at a time (alternatively, they may not be mutually exclusive -
> perhaps it makes sense to do a log transform but only plot percentages
> of the maximum log-transformed value, so then there would be two
> buttons, with the possibility of having none, one, or two buttons
> depressed at once).

If you were to go for such a solution, you will then have to make sure that
the key button is 'separated' from those three icons. Also, while talking
about icons (log, %, I), I am not sure whether some users would find them
intuitive at all (I am thinking about non-modellers here).

What about some kind of a drop-down list that would allow 'ticks', so what
Andrew suggests would still be possible? Look at COR's computational mode
for an example of what I mean (the fourth button from the left, the one that
allows to specify whether you want the state variables, constants and/or
computed variables to be displayed.

Alan.

--
Dr Alan Garny
University of Oxford, Department of Physiology, Anatomy & Genetics
Sherrington Building, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PT, England
http://noble.physiol.ox.ac.uk/people/agarny/
http://cor.physiol.ox.ac.uk/

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• [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin, Andrew Miller, 10/12/2007
  • [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin, Alan Garny, 10/12/2007
    • [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin, Alan Garny, 10/12/2007
      • [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin, Justin Marsh, 10/15/2007
        • [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin, Alan Garny, 10/16/2007

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