[Design] Fwd: [Bug 4520] An alternate way to time in event detail view

[Lisa Dusseault]

On Nov 4, 2005, at 1:39 PM, Mike Carroll wrote:
>>
>
> Jakob Nielson gives "Design Guidelines for Visualizing Links" in one 
> of his Alertbox articles: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20040510.html
>
> "Users shouldn't have to guess or scrub the page to find out where 
> they can click."
>
> Similar guidelines may apply to fields in the Calendar design.

This is often true for Web sites, where content may be rather static 
and most text is probably not clickable, but I have doubts about how 
far this advice extends into rich client applications where content is 
dynamic and almost everything is clickable or selectable.   If you take 
a look at the menu bar of a Mac OS X application the text doesn't look 
like a button or clickable in any way and the mouse over doesn't even 
give a hint.  Still, any computer user knows how to click on 
application menus  (the OS may be optimizing for existing computer 
users and hard to use for absolute beginner computer users but that's 
another story).  Similarly, there may be places even in Web sites where 
users don't need much guidance to realize they can click somewhere.  
E.g. when I'm reading blog entries and want to navigate to the blog 
home, I try clicking on the blog name even if there's no link 
underline.

My personal experience switching from Windows to Mac OS X 1.5 years ago 
was that I had absolutely no problem learning that text fields in iCal 
application event detail view were editable.  Further, I find that the 
text fields are beautifully readable without distracting boxes and 
lines.  The experience was fine when I first saw the widget and, even 
better, is optimized for day to day pleasure of use.  While this is 
just one user and not a sufficient sample size, I hope it's 
illustrative of how plain text widgets may be usable -- the real answer 
comes from testing, not from guesses or guidelines.

Lisa

>
> ++hobbitt
>
> ----------
> Mike Carroll, Pete Townsend, Washington USA
> http://www.druidlabs.com