toolbar icons

[Andreas Pakulat]

On 06.08.09 13:31:51, David Nolden wrote:
> Am Donnerstag 06 August 2009 13:07:18 schrieb Andreas Pakulat:
> > That takes a lot more time to memorize icon and action. And especially with
> > the toolbar the idea is to _quickly_ do something, not waiting another
> > second until the tooltip comes up and you can read what a button does.
> In my experience, the toolbar is mainly useful to quickly do some very common 
> action _again_ without having to remember keyboard shortcuts. Every toolbar 
> action is also replicated in the menu, and should have the same icon there.
> 
> So you can also learn the icon using the menu, and then use the toolbar to get 
> quick access to that action.

Still, to learn about the icon the user needs to do this actions a couple
of times. And that completely contradicts the "quickly" part, as navigating
the menu is slow, even more so if the user doesn't remember in which menu
the item was. Sure you could say that the action is simply placed in the
wrong menu, but we also cannot have a separate menu for each and every
"group of actions" as that would take too much space (look at the tools or
view menu for example).
 
> With added text, the toolbar icons get another use: Increasing 
> discoverability. But the better solution would be emphasizing such important 
> actions in the main menu, so they can be easily discovered there, and then the 
> toolbar without icon descriptions can be used to allow quick access to those 
> actions again.

There's no way of emphasizing them in the menu, so thats just pointless.

Andreas

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