10 Jun
2004
10 Jun
'04
4:36 p.m.
On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 08:02:48PM +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
It is unpredictable. I don't much care for it as a UI feature. It is
very hard for me to stay below the 'fine-grain' speed limit.
I think that your frontal lobe is saying "knobs are round, move the mouse
around them" but I still believe that your hand will find it more
intuitive and correct to move the mouse in one direction - up and down.
OH! Hrrm, yes, well. I see the point, but I don't think it will work.
Differing semantics for similar-looking widget is the worst of all possible
choices.
When you move
the mouse slowly, you get very fine control. When you move
it faster, the control gets coarser. So you can move a knob from 0.0 to
1.0 quickly with a fast mouse gesture, or you can move it from 0.5 to 0.6
very slowly.
Thanks. Sounds like trouble with controlabilty/predictability to me. I'm still
going to put my bet on linear. If you do a usability study of
linear vs radial, I bet linear will be more obvious and easy to control.
And you will not convince me otherwise until I see a usability test done
with non-LAD users :)
Maybe linear is easier to handle, but the usual knob graphics are
still misleading (you can't tell me something round with clear center
hints at linear movement, even if the real world metaphor is left out). This is such a
bad idea, unless the control is an X/Y control to start
with.
No, I did not mean 2 axes for one widget. Only that a linear widget has
to indicate it's direction even before interaction happens, and that it
makes sense to use vertical for volume and horizonal for pan in the
same interface.