Bugzilla – Full Text Bug Listing
| Summary: | [client] Buttons rather than icons on git status page | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Product: | [ECD] Orion | Reporter: | John Arthorne <john.arthorne> |
| Component: | Git | Assignee: | Susan McCourt <susan> |
| Status: | RESOLVED FIXED | QA Contact: | |
| Severity: | normal | ||
| Priority: | P3 | CC: | simon_kaegi, susan, Szymon.Brandys, tomasz.zarna |
| Version: | unspecified | ||
| Target Milestone: | 0.4 M2 | ||
| Hardware: | PC | ||
| OS: | Windows 7 | ||
| Whiteboard: | |||
| Bug Depends on: | 360986 | ||
| Bug Blocks: | |||
(I'm not suggesting changes for 0.3, just opening now while I think of it) I kind of agree. I use this UI every day and still hover to get a hint from time to time. Icons vs. Buttons... well there's CSS for that but I do think the UI could be clearer. For 0.4 I am hoping to push on the idea of finer grained command scopes (pane or viewlet-level...for lack of a better term). I finally wrote a bug about this, see bug 360986. We have distinct visual places for global commands, page-level commands, and navigator item level commands, but things kind of get random after that. Icon anecdote: This morning I wanted to do a merge, and I hunted around for several minutes trying to find the merge command. All I could find was rebase, so I thought maybe we had ditched merge in favour or rebase. Finally I asked Tomasz and he pointed out the merge icon that was right in front of my face. This was made worse by the fact the merge was the *only* command that appeared as an icon in the repositories page, so I completely missed it. The experience pushed me even further into the "text over icons" camp. Some sites use both buttons with icons and labels together. I'm not sure what the key is and when icons are better than just text though. For sure '+' icon for actions that add something (like add a branch, remote) is justified. I've just implemented a command "button" style in bug 360986 and have changed git status to use the button style. I think there is still visual polish to do with respect to the "panes" but that is tracked in other work. Fixed in e609616c7c7b84f2f3bafe47a7ab7c78a1d654be |
0.3 RC2 I know we've talked about this before but I don't know if there is a current bug report open. I think the iconic buttons on the git status page should be replaced by buttons with the command names on them ("Push", "Fetch", "Merge", etc). They should look like real buttons rather than just hyperlinks. My reasoning: - it's not entirely clear these are actually buttons right now. There is no visual indication outlining a toolbar, and the button itself has no bevel. You will only know it is a button when you hover over it. - Maybe it's just me, but every time I find myself staring at those tiny icons with various arrows in different directions, and I have to use the tooltip to be sure it's doing what I want. I shouldn't need tooltips to figure out something I use all the time. - Typical user expectation is that a hyperlink will take me to a different page, rather than performing some operation. These are actions that don't transition me to a different page. By contrast, look at Boris' mockup that uses buttons: https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/attachment.cgi?id=195169 In this shot, it is absolutely clear what is clickable and what those clicks will do.