[rkward-devel] Usability: Informal/Heuristics based remarks

[Jan Wort]

>> - Data Import. Suggestion: "Import Data" is error prone, submenu seems
>> to provide same functions. Suggestion: Let’s get rid of "Import Data"
>
>ok, getting rid of this is easy, of course, and you finally got
>me convinced that it's better than the current state. But for
>clarification: In an ideal world, would the dialog still go away, or
>would it be improved to make format selection more obvious (or more
>automatic)?

I think an improvement of the dialog is hard to make (It should be kept standard-ish; the only thing I can think of is hiding all files that are not of the selected format). What would help, as you say is some sort of automatic recognition: If you click an .sav it uses the SPSS importer etc. - so it "just does the right thing" (in the ideal world) 

So I'd suggest: Get rid of the dialog for now, and possibly file a bug/feature for an automatic recognition of the imported file format.

>> - 2-List-Selector Bug (found in Recode). Under certain conditions the
>> toggle arrow gets stuck on one position.
>
> Currently the logic is: If something is selected in the target list
> (the one on the right hand), then the arrow is pointed left.
>
> AFAIU your suggestion is simply to change this to: If something is
> selected in the target list _and_ the target list has focus, then the
> arrow is pointed left. Correct? Or it might lose the selection when
> losing focus?
Exactly: For the user the arrow should always point away from the highlighted and *focussed* list entry (so focus+seletion anywhere is more important than the selection on the target list)

> Ah, reading again, I see that you suggest using two buttons, instead.
> Yes, I think that makes sense. For the case of single item selectors
> (such as "Select variable to Recode" on the first tab), we'll stick to
> the current single button solution, though, right?

It would probably make sense to keep it (mainly because showing that  two buttons belong to the single height slot is difficult) for single slots and go to two arrows for list-to-list selection.

Jan