I'm personally a big fan of tabs. They are easy to understand and you can see what is available by just glancing at them--you don't have to notice a drop-down list and figure out that it contains different view options and then click it to see what those options are.<div>
<br></div><div>-Rob<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 1:17 AM, Wahooney <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:wahooney@wahooney.net">wahooney@wahooney.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#3333ff">
<font size="-1"><font face="Tahoma">I'm inclined to agree, but I
believe that all similar functionality should be accessed in a similar
manner, having tabs for the nodes and drop lists for everything else is
a bit odd. So either everything should be tabs or everything should be
drop lists.</font></font><div><div></div><div class="h5"><br>
<br>
joe wrote:
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>I tend to think the drop list is a little confusing to people, though;
it's not as clear as a real tab bar.
Joe
On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 2:28 AM, Wahooney <a href="mailto:wahooney@wahooney.net" target="_blank"><wahooney@wahooney.net></a> wrote:
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre>An easier and more consistent solution to that is to have a drop list like
in the dopesheet (The one that switches between Dopesheet, Action Editor,
ShapeKey Editor) that switches between the various modes. It's also more
consisrent with the other screens that can modify multiple aspects in a
single screen.
joe wrote:
There was also a valid point about how switching between material,
texture and composite nodes in the node editor. This seems pretty
obvious to me, heh, but I never thought of it; essentially we have a
tabbed editor, with the "tabs" being not-entirely-intuitive,
standalone icons (especially the composite icon confuses people).
I suggest we actually implement a real generic tab bar that could be
used by the node editor, the outliner, buttons window, etc, something
where it'd be really obvious what's going on.
Joe
On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 2:31 PM, Wahooney <a href="mailto:wahooney@wahooney.net" target="_blank"><wahooney@wahooney.net></a> wrote:
I just had a quick scan through the usability report written by the folks at
the University of Oulu (get it here if you haven't seen it:
<a href="http://tols17.oulu.fi/~tkorhonen/ukkoss3/images/usability_test_blender.pdf" target="_blank">http://tols17.oulu.fi/~tkorhonen/ukkoss3/images/usability_test_blender.pdf</a>)
They raise a few valid points in their findings and I'm kicking a few
solutions around in my head:
= Discoverability =
I'm wondering if it wouldn't be to Blender's benefit to have some very short
(~1 minute), professional looking (ie. common layout, format, etc. between
vids), voice overed (possibly localised) videos explaining one small aspect
of Blender to the user at a time (ala Maya & 3ds Max 2008+), these can
either be downloaded from <a href="http://b.org" target="_blank">b.org</a> (individually or in a package), viewed
online or perhaps even packaged with a special Learner's/Noob's Edition of
Blender. Of course, the vids can also be published on video sharing sites
(youtube, vimeo, etc.), it won't hurt to teach more people about blender ;)
Note: There shouldn't be too many of these videos initially, since they are
only meant to teach the basics of Blender to the user, ie. Viewport
Navigation, Window Managing, Translating objects, Editing Mesh Objects, etc.
This isn't the place to be teaching people how to model a human head with
rigging, hair and lip sync, unless someone out there can do all that under a
minute :P
== Hot Key Discoverability ==
Bracketed hot keys in tooltips (generated from the key map) would probably
be the easiest solution for this.
OR
Flash / HTML&Java / whatever file with a keyboard map, showing keys and
their functions, again pulled from the keymap. I'm not quite sure how this
will be done, since I don't even know how the key maps work at this point :P
but I'm sure someone out there will be clued up enough to figure it out.
= The Do Composite question =
Do Composite was recently discussed on ML and there were suggestions to
remove it altogether, I suggest that it be renamed to just plain Composite
and be placed with the other rendering togglables (Shadows, SSS, EnvMap,
Radio [which I believe is getting the chop] and Raytracing) in the
misleadingly named, IMO, Shading tab in the Scene Panel and activated by
default.
Removal probably isn't the best idea, since there are cases where disabling
compositing will be a handy ability.
I hope this helps the design direction in some way, I know 2.5 isn't quite
at the point where these issues are a priority, but hopefully some better
ideas may be sparked by these suggestions.
Cheers,
Keith "Wahooney" Boshoff
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