[Scummvm-devel] ScummVM Launcher Usability (was: 1.0 or not 1.0?)

Thierry Crozat (Yahoo! Mail) thierry.crozat at yahoo.co.uk
Tue Jul 14 09:46:47 CEST 2009


Le 13 juil. 09 à 23:58, Thierry Crozat ((Yahoo! Mail)) a écrit :

> Since you mention that, I have a few suggestions to improve the
> launcher (it seems that usability course I had last year will come in
> handy after all). I am taking snapshots for the new launcher and I
> noticed the following points (I can add all this to the GUI TO DO or
> a new GUI Usability page on the Wiki if you want):
>
> 1) That Mass Add button is really not obvious. Without a
> documentation you have no way to guess it is there (either that or
> you have a twisted mind). Unfortunately I don't have an easy
> suggestion to fix that. I will try to think about it.

Here are some ideas on that point (which I think is an important one).

1a) have only a "Add Games" (note the plural) button. Basically "Add  
Game" and "Mass Add" do the same: they add all the games in the  
selected directory (except that "Add Game" forces the selected  
directory to contain one game directly in the selected directory and  
add only this game and otherwise triggers an error). The separation  
of the two concepts is a developer thing imho (because it is  
implemented differently?). I think for the user "Add Gane" and "Mass  
Add" is actually the same concept.

1b) use two separate buttons for Add Game and Mass Add. But the GUI  
has already a lot of buttons and I don't think adding one more button  
is a good idea

1c) small downward arrow on the right of the Add Game button. Click  
on the arrow displays a menu "Add one Game" and "Add several Games"  
and clicking everywhere else on the button does the same as selecting  
"Add one Game".  I don't like that idea much either (because this  
means a small area on which to click which goes against usability  
rules and might be an issue on some platform).

1d) just one button and a "Mass Add" (or "Add all games from this  
directory and sub-directories") option (checkbox) in the file  
selector. This will be an issue for platforms on which the native  
file chooser is used though.


>
> 2) Would it be possible to add some sort of tooltip or inline help? I
> know this is probably not a trivial task but I think it would help
> for non obvious things (e.g. the Mass Add button or some options).
>
> 3) In the options tabs, the OK and Cancel button seems to be in the
> current tab, but they are really shared between all the tabs (i.e.
> when you click OK you validates the changes for all the tabs and not
> only the current one). I think they should visibly be outside of
> (below) the tabs.
>
> 4) I am not convinced the Graphics mode are well sorted. To start
> with, in a single selector you mix scalers (1x, 2x, 3x) and
> algorithms to do the scaling (e.g SAI, AdvMAME, HQ). But then when I
> look at the list the first question that pops-up is what is the
> scaling for DotMatrix (or SuperEagle)? Also currently the graphics
> modes are sorted by algorithms, but I think the users will first want
> to select a scaler (i.e. the size of the window, while they might not
> see much difference with the selected algorithm). Therefore I have
> two propositions:
> 4a) using two selectors: you first select the scaler, and on the
> right you have another selector to select the algorithm (listing only
> the ones relevant for the currently selected scaler).
> 4b) sorting the graphic modes by scaler (which could also answer my
> question; if DotMatrix is between 2xSAI and AdvMAME2x I will strongly
> suspect that it is also a 2x scaler) and then by increasing quality
> of result (which is subjective but I suspect HQ2x is "better" than 2x
> for example).
>
> By the way, is there any reason why the scaling is sometimes as
> prefix (e.g. 2xSAI) and sometimes as suffix (e.g. AdvMAME2x)?
>
> 5) Most selector have a <default> entry, which I believe correspond
> to one of the entries below and might be platform dependent. But I am
> not sure this is the case for the Render mode in the Graphics tab.
> Shouldn't there be an additional "normal" entry or something in that
> selector?
>
> 6) There is no way to know what the default is. A tooltip or inline
> help might help here as well.Or maybe "<default: the default value>"
> instead of just "<default>".
>
> 7) The sorting of the output rates in the Audio tab is strange. Why
> not sort by increasing rates?
>
> 8) I am not too much in favour of a number that doesn't mean much in
> the sliders (e.g. subtitle speed, volumes). I am not against the
> value either, but maybe some hint could be added on what it means.
> For example add a "slow" on the left of the subtitle speed slider and
> "fast" on the right (resp. "low" and "high" for the volume sliders)
> and the value only on the right of that.
>
> 9) I don't like much the button to toggle between "Speech only",
> "Speech and Subtitles" and "Subtitles only". Why make this selector
> different from the other selectors (the combo boxes) when it should
> work the same (i.e. we want to select one item among several? And we
> don't know what are all the alternatives until we have clicked
> several times and came back to the original setting, at which point
> we might still need to click several times to select the one we want.

One more reason I don't like it: it looks like a push button and  
usually push buttons are used to trigger actions. And the norm is  
that the label should describe the action that will be performed when  
clicking on the button. Here there is not much action performed,  
except if you consider "changing the value of the Speech and  
Subtitles" option an action. More importantly the user might be  
confuse, thinking that if the label is currently "Text and Subtitles"  
this will be what he will get by clicking on the button (and if I am  
not mistaken this is what he currently has and not what he will get).

>
> 10) On the Volume tab I would make the Mute All disable the volume
> sliders. If selected there is not much sense to modify the volumes.
>
>
> I will stop there for tonight but I might have other remarks once I
> have read again my usability manual.
>
> Thierry
>
> NB: actually after having written all this I think I will add it to
> the wiki tomorrow, whether you want it or not ;-)
>
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