[linux-audio-dev] Knobs / widget design (radial movement)

[Lee Revell]

On Fri, 2004-06-25 at 12:00, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 25, 2004 at 06:54:20PM +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> 
> > Requiring the user to read documentation to learn about functionality 
> > he would not even expect is not an option.
> 
> Have education levels gone down *that* far ?

It is not necessarily about education.  If you make a widget such that
you have to read docs to use it fully, then you have to translate your
docs into N languages.  If you just make it self-explanatory, then you
are done.  Of course this requires more thought in the design.

I think this is a lot of the reason European (especially Dutch) design
is so much more advanced than American.  In the States, a fire exit sign
says 'EXIT'.  In the Netherlands, it is an icon that unmistakably means
'this way out', without any text required.  This is *much* harder to do
than just 'EXIT' in big red letters, but required.  If there is a fire 
in Amsterdam for example, you will have people from 5-10 different
countries running for the exit.

It will not always be possible to make the interface 100%
self-explanatory.  The canonical example of this is that there is no
good icon that unambiguously represents 'Undo'.

With regards to radial movement, the only self-explanatory way to do it
that I have seen is mousewheel-on-mouseover.  People will figure this
out with no documentation at all.  Please make your radial controls work
this way unless there is a good reason not to.

Lee