Activity Screen : Resize and Dragging

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Monday, July 18, 2011 11:00:09 Fania Jöck wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I actually prepared some layouts for resizing and dragging of Boxes
> during our last workshop here in Darmstadt and forgot to share them.
> 
> DRAGGING BOXES
> So for dragging the Box I suggest do use a color highlight, that
> actually show, where the box can be released, see scribble:
> http://share.basyskom.com/contour/UIDesign/Contour_DragBox.jpg

is the color box where it will land if dropped or where it was dragged from? i 
assume it's the landing zone? if so ... i also assume it doesn't need to be 
quite that brigh and chunky? would a simple lightened + transcluent version of 
the fame + title (contents do not need to be shown) be a bit nicer?

> This color highlight would help to focus the users attention on that
> current object, that needs to be manipulated, edited etc. With only
> white and transparent objects this is hard to achieve, in my opinion.
> Could we just choose a color here, that would be also part of the brand
> of Contour (we could actually also adapt the grey-ish Logo to that color
> then), or is there already some highlight color in Plasma?

there are highlight colors that are consistent across all KDE applications, as 
part of the themable color scheme.

> RESIZING BOXES
> For resizing of boxes, I think the user needs a little hint, that this
> feature is possible. Currently no test user got that feature, if he
> didnt watch it before. Normally the edges get just a small icon, that
> indicates the "grip", see scribble for two possible icons:
> http://share.basyskom.com/contour/UIDesign/Contour_ResizeBox.jpg. For me
> the first row with the little dots is a better symbol; the arrows
> indicate more an enlargement in 2 directions, but our feature currently
> supports only extension in a horizontal direction.

personally, i think the arrows are not visually very pleasing, mostly because 
of trying to squeeze a symbol into a tiny space which really can never look 
great.

what about a few "grip dots" in the middle of the frame edges? perhaps of only 
the selected one so that there aren't dots (or your mockup's case: arrows) 
everywhere on the screen making it all look very cluttered?

i also feel that we simply will not get away from having some introductory 
materials (video?) for the user. trying to make every feature blatantly 
obvious from nothing more than inspecting the UI at a glance is going to lead, 
imho, to a very visually heavy result that scores low on the visual aesthetics 
scale.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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