Intuitive "Popup" Scrollbars

[Celeste Lyn Paul]

On Monday 18 August 2008 10:14:37 Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Celeste Lyn Paul wrote on 18/08/08 14:01:
> > On Monday 18 August 2008 08:31:03 Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> >...
> >
> >> KDE does a similar (but somewhat more confusing) thing by having two
> >> up/left buttons in a scrollbar, one at the the top/left and the other
> >> next to the down/right button.
> >
> > Hmm.. are you using a weird widget set?  We do it exactly like OS X
> > with an up control at the top and an up/down control at the bottom
> > (see attached, left KDE3, right KDE4)
> >...
>
> In Mac OS X, a vertical scrollbar has one up button and one down button.
> The Appearance control panel lets you specify where the up button goes.
> (It's possible to have both buttons at both ends, but only using
> command-line settings or third-party utilities like TinkerTool.)

Aah, I see.  Strange, all of the screenshots I googled had three arrow 
buttons.

> In KDE, as shown in your screenshot, a vertical scrollbar has two up
> buttons and one down button. It's not obvious why going up is twice as
> important as going down, and having multiple buttons for the same task
> causes dither.

Hum.. I've never noticed anyone have problems with it during testing before (~ 
30 participants using KDE in various ways) and I don't remember anyone from 
OpenUsability mentioning anything.  I think the second up arrow is a simple 
single-learning event, if you want to try the up arrow, it is obvious what it 
does and so the user can choose to use that method or not. Scrolling is not 
inhibited by it.  *shrugs*

>
> Cheers
> --
> Matthew Paul Thomas
> http://mpt.net.nz/



-- 
Celeste Lyn Paul
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org