"cdelashmutt" wrote : Am I an authority in usability? By no means. Can I quote
leading usability experts as to the validity of my suggestions? Nope.
|
| I'm simply approaching this from the perspective of a user trying to understand
and use the portal, which is all that I really can do. ;)
I am not trying to belittle your work. This is much appreciated in particular with respect
to finding out all the different inconsistencies in the GUI. However, our usability
problems are not going to go away with just that. People have started to work on the
issues you've identified and some of their fixes result in new inconsistency. I'm
trying to make sure we get the proper help from someone who really knows about this stuff
to provide solutions to the problems you identified so that we don't end up in an
lengthy loop of modifications that could very well end up in not improving the GUI that
much.
"cdelashmutt" wrote : In reference to the icons suggestion, I have a couple of
reasons for suggesting them. First off, the text links seem to run together even with the
pipe separators. One has to stop/think/interpret the text to understand which action they
may want to take. People respond better to icons, or even text that looks more like an
icon (buttons with adequate padding, etc). We could consider having icons with text next
to them, similar to toolbar buttons, or for consistency's sake we could use a dropdown
list and a "Go" button similar to the way CMS does it's functions if no one
likes the icon idea.
People might respond better to icons, I don't know. What I know is that if they do,
they will probably if the icons are well designed and meaningful and this is something
that is extremely hard to do. Plus, icons are not an end in themselves. In particular,
even if we do end up using icons/colors/whatever, we need to make sure that whatever
information we convey degrades properly and that's another hard task that we,
developers, are not fit for. Not that we're not interested about it (I know I am) or
that we couldn't learn about it. We simply don't have time considering that
we're also supposed to add features, improve performance and fix bugs...
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