Instant apply and explicit apply in KDE HIG

[Ellen Reitmayr]

On Sunday, 5. March 2006 21:24, Cornelius Schumacher wrote:
> On Saturday 04 March 2006 07:41, Ellen Reitmayr wrote:
> > i fully agree it does not for settings dialog and a lot of other stuff.
>
> Why shouldn't instant apply work in config dialogs? There are many config
> dialogs which would greatly benefit from instant apply. [...] My feeling is 
that there aren't that much
> cases, where instant apply wouldn't work.

Well, I did not mean that instant apply would not work in most config dialogs, 
but it's benefits do not outweigh the costs. the costs are a high effort to 
change existing dialogs, and a long conversion phase where each application 
has different mixes of explicit and instant apply dialogs (some will redesign 
all the config dialogs, some only fonts, some will only change the newly 
added dialogs).

While most people on this list and other power users will have few problems to 
handle such inconsistencies, it will be hard for less experienced users. If 
we limit the scope of instant apply to some, defined situations, possibly in 
combination with a different UI approach such as dockers, it is easier to 
care for a consistent implementation of this new approach. 

I don't want to seem conservative, but I want to avoid situations where an 
apparent 'usability improvement' leads to a mess of inconsistent 
implementations - and in the end makes KDE less usable, especially for 
non-power users.

Cheers,
/el


-- 

Ellen Reitmayr
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-usability-devel/attachments/20060306/e00a9d46/attachment.pgp