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[cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin


Chronological Thread 
  • From: alan.garny at dpag.ox.ac.uk (Alan Garny)
  • Subject: [cellml-dev] r1826 - in pce/trunk/chrome: content/controls content/util skin
  • Date: Fri, 12 Oct 2007 07:29:21 +0100
> > 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.

While I am at it, it would also be good to have that feature accessible
through the context menu of the graph(s), as well as through the main menu.
Not everybody will like/want to access that feature through those buttons.

Alan.



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