[Bf-taskforce25] Mockup note

[Samuel Nicholas]

So I got a little enthused right, and thought I would spend some time 
making another mockup you see, so I tried just edit'n williams mockups 
but it wasnt that fun see, so I started from scratch.

Its pretty hard I found to make it consistent and had to re-do a few 
things. so respect to all the people who gave a go at this.

http://enetheru.aglargelair.net/files/b_interface_mock00.png
http://enetheru.aglargelair.net/files/b_interface_mock00.xcf

Some thoughts I had while doing this excercise were:
1. Fields that can be dragged and dropped to and from should have their 
icon next to or in, clicking on the icon and dragging should allow you 
to drop on a similar field to make a data link or copy.
2. Combo boxes should be avoided as much as possible
3. I was sure I thought more than that during the process
4. I like text inside buttons too.

cheers all

Samuel
Note: attempted accent in text inspired from reading 'His Dark Materials'.

Ton Roosendaal wrote:
> Hi Sam,
>
> Thanks for the mockups with hupulakuuta!
>
> It does show quite clear how long labels in number buttons don't work 
> well :)
> Maybe compare with a text-outside version?
>
> -Ton-
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation   ton at blender.org    www.blender.org
> Blender Institute BV  Entrepotdok 57A  1018AD Amsterdam The Netherlands
>
> On 16 Mar, 2009, at 11:55, Samuel Nicholas wrote:
>
>> Matt Ebb wrote:
>>> On Sat, Mar 14, 2009 at 11:49 PM, Ton Roosendaal <ton at blender.org> 
>>> wrote:
>>>> I would definitely propose to not immediately reject this idea, and
>>>> investigate layout opportunities with both concepts. For example;
>>> Ok, I'm not immediately rejecting it, sure it would be good to try and
>>> see if there are other alternatives. There are negative aspects too
>>> though, to be aware of.
>>>
>>>> Now imagine translated UIs that might be even give worse cases. Try
>>>> some translations in 2.48 and check how it looks?
>>> ...
>>>> And then there's the fact that, if a button cannot hold the name +
>>>> value anymore, stuff have to get truncated... is the name or value 
>>>> then
>>>> going to be shortened?
>>>> We should allow users to input things with the optimal precision
>>>> possible, not being dependent on what the name of a value is.
>>> I'm not sure what you mean for the translation - I suspect you mean if
>>> the string is too long it needs to be clipped off? If so, I agree,
>>> this is a good argument for separating out. It's already quite
>>> annoying when long names mean the button gets less precision than it
>>> should. It would still be possible to clip the end of the title and
>>> leave the numbers intact, with the label on the button, but yes, it
>>> would be weird and potentially quite confusing.
>>>
>>>> And we also could prefer add the metrics types, or degrees, or
>>>> percentage symbols inside the buttons.
>>> We can do this currently, in fact I already implemented it for RNA
>>> 'percentage' subtypes :) You can see it in datablocks outliner view,
>>> but the only one it's implemented for is Render data resolution % :)
>>> As a side note, I would have already added the degrees too, but it's
>>> not an ASCII character and doesn't work with non-international fonts
>>> atm...
>>>
>>>
>>> Anyways, for the reasons I mentioned previously, I'm still not too
>>> keen on the properties_text_outside.png mockup. I was thinking though
>>> what possible modifications could be made to keep the advantages of
>>> both methods:
>>> * title spatially separated from value, for alignment, truncation etc
>>> * large available space for manipulating the button
>>> * clear visual connection between title and value, so you know exactly
>>> what title a property has at a glance.
>>>
>>> I did a few quick ideas here:
>>> http://mke3.net/blender/interface/controls/number_fields_title01.png
>>>
>>> The idea is that you still should be able to drag on the text area to
>>> increment and decrement, giving a nice large click target. Photoshop
>>> works in a similar way (
>>> http://mke3.net/blender/interface/controls/ps_dragvalue.png ) but I
>>> don't like their implementation much - it's not communicated clearly
>>> and I only found out about this feature myself by accident, since it
>>> just looks like a normal text label. I think we can improve on this by
>>> showing that it's part of the number field somehow. Incidentally, XSI
>>> also has this problem, but their solution is quite inelegant, drawing
>>> huge dashed lines between the separated titles and values, so you have
>>> at least a small hope of your eye tracking across and finding the
>>> right UI control. This is really not good graphic design (
>>> http://www.edharriss.com/xsi/4point0_images/prefs.jpg ).
>>>
>>> Regardless of what happens, what I think is extremely important is
>>> consistency. I really would not like to be in a situation where the
>>> important information isn't always in a consistent place, and you
>>> never really know where to look for it.
>>>
>>> If it's all text-on-buttons, you know when looking for a setting that
>>> the information is on a button and looks a certain way. Your eye can
>>> then quickly scan all the items on screen that fit that visual pattern
>>> and find the information. Otherwise if the text is consistently
>>> outside the buttons, your eye knows to scan over the screen, finding
>>> the button, and checking next to it at a certain offset. If it's a
>>> mixture, it makes it harder to find things quickly, since your
>>> eye/brain has to take more time processing things, its not as much
>>> taking advantage of our abilities for visual pattern recognition, and
>>> I would very much not like to see this happen unless it worked based
>>> on some very clear rules that users can immediately understand and
>>> predict.
>>>
>>> cheers,
>>>
>>> Matt
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-taskforce25 mailing list
>>> Bf-taskforce25 at blender.org
>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-taskforce25
>> Hi,
>>
>> http://enetheru.aglargelair.net/files/number_fields_title02.png
>>
>> A bit of right and left alignment can help. ive added some highlight to
>> also seperate but imho it adds too much clutter.
>> space will always be limited so I think the value should stay, the txt
>> truncated. perhaps on mouse hover over the truncated txt part it swaps
>> so that the value is truncated instead this gives some more information
>> quickly rather than wait for a tooltip.
>>
>> thx for reading
>>
>> Samuel.
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>>
>
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