toolbar icons

[David Nolden]

Am Donnerstag 06 August 2009 13:49:21 schrieb 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).
It's quicker to use the toolbar icon than the menu, so where's the 
contradiction to "quickly"?

The menu has to be used anyway for many actions, as we want the toolbar to 
contain only a hand full of selected actions. Removing the text from the 
toolbar icons may lead the user to look at the menu first when wanting to 
achieve something, rather than already having that randomly selected action in 
the toolbar.

Not a big tradeoff IMO, as the menu has to be used anyway, and the price paid 
for that little convenience of seeing the text is a either permanently reduced 
productivity (For example, the context-browser line might not fit into the 
screen, which is more useful than _any_ toolbar icon), or forcing the user to 
reconfigure KDevelop. And an app that _needs_ to be reconfigured first before 
it can fully shine is not a good app. Most of the shallow internet reviewers 
would probably not even notice that there is something like a context-browser 
bar, if it wasn't visible by default.

> > 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.
Emphasizing them means placing them in a way that makes sense, and reducing 
the overall amount of menu items visible at a time.

Greetings, David