Chronological Thread 

< Chronological >      < Thread >

---

Hi,
You are definitely both correct about the icons. How much space on the
toolbar are we willing to use for this particular piece of
functionality? It may be simpler to use a purely textual
representation; ie a button 'linear/linear graph', with a drop
down menu with all of the options that we want to use iterated out
(ie 'log/linear graph', 'log/log graph' etc).

Alternatively, for a less space consuming option a drop down
menu of icons (or a dropdown menu where the top level element
is the icon of the current view state, with both an icon and a textual
caption on each of the menu elements) is a midway point between
explicitness of function and verbosity of form.

Justin.

>>> 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).
>>
>>> 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).
>> 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.

---

• [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

---

Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.18.