[sldev] Landmarks and Navigation Project Update 2008-05-22

[Jacek Antonelli]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 11:22 AM, Soft <soft at lindenlab.com> wrote:
> We already have a location bar - it's that parcel info display.
> Clicking that to edit and putting navigation buttons beside it would
> be an alternative to a new lateral strip.

I'm torn here. Yes, we have the location bar already, but clicking
that already has a behavior, and an important and often-used one --
bringing up the "About Parcel" floater. I'd hate to change that
behavior without a very good reason, simply because it's so ingrained.

But I agree that the location bar could be leveraged here, since it
already fits into the users' mental model of "This is my location".
Maybe there could be an expand-down arrow button (like the expand-up
arrow for the detailed volume controls) which would cause the widget
to roll down and display a more detailed look, including the
back/forward buttons.

All that said, the top menu bar is already terribly crowded. In the
long term, I'd say these things should be split up into discrete,
movable widgets (and this seems to be on the roadmap). But in the
meantime, changing the existing UI is like subtly reorganizing the
things on my desk -- "Stop messing with my stuff, I can't find
anything anymore!"

 23, 2008 at 1:51 PM, Johnnie Carling <johnniecarling at gmail.com> wrote:
> If I was paying an outside company and
> they "invented" a browser tool bar I don't think I'd be all that impressed.
> (no offense intended to the folks doing this)

Agreed here. Most of the mock-ups seem to lack consistency with the
existing user interface model that SL has. I don't just mean
stylistically, with the colors and such (I actually much prefer the
dark organic over Dazzle, tho I have reservations about the gold). My
main point here is about how buttons and other UI elements behave. As
tame and uninspired as the existing UI model is, new additions should
be mostly consistent with it, for consistency's sake.

~

Other comments:

1. Gosh, those back / forward / dropdown buttons are tiny and closely
packed! Even a spritely and computer-savvy young person like myself
has to concentrate to get the mouse cursor over that tiny dropdown
button. I can't even imagine how hard it would be for older Residents
(I've known some over 60 years "young"), or Residents with arthritis
or otherwise limited dexterity. I'd be constantly worried that I'd
click one of the other buttons by mistake, and get whisked off to
someplace I didn't want to go.

2. Speaking of which: would the back / forward buttons be
instant-action, like web browsers? I'd argue against that, on the
basis that teleporting is fundamentally different from flipping
through web pages. It's a much more significant action, especially
given how long teleporting can take, and how prone to crashing it can
be. I'd rather select a target, then press a "Go" button to initiate
the teleport.

3. No SLURLs in the location bar, please. They're ugly, hard to
decipher, and non-informative about the parcel name (which is the
important thing to the user). Being able to communicate a location in
a clickable fashion is useful functionally, but SLURLs are awful and
intimidating. A button to copy the SLURL to your clipboard is fine
(even desirable) but SLURLs themselves should be out of sight as much
as possible.

4. Generally speaking, I'd advise not to stretch the web browser
metaphor farther than it will go. There are some concepts that are
useful to borrow, but at the end of the day, SL isn't the web. Don't
try to constrain or distort the solution to fit inside the shell of a
rather different type of application, which has its own rather
different way of being used.

 - Jacek