[TYPO3-core] RFC: #7986: Vertical aligned Icons in List-Module

Jeff Segars jsegars at alumni.rice.edu
Tue Apr 8 20:59:14 CEST 2008


Dmitry Dulepov [typo3] wrote:
> Hi yet again!
> 
> Dmitry Dulepov [typo3] wrote:
>> Actually I think this is what disturbed me much in the screenshot: all 
>> rows are different. I am used to typical toolbars where I see all 
>> buttons, I know their positions and I always see that button is not 
>> available when it is greyed out. Examples are well-known: any Windows 
>> or MacOS app (Word, for example). May be we should the same approach 
>> here?
> 
> I just found the same view in Alan Cooper's "About Face: the essentials 
> of user interface design". Quoting from chapter 23:
> 
> "...Unlike menus, we don't depend on toolbar buttons to teach us how 
> they are used. Although we depend on buttons primarilly for speed and 
> convenience, their behavior should not mislead us. Toolbar buttons 
> should become disabled when they are no longer applicable due to the 
> current selection. They may or may not gray out - this is up to you -
> but if a button becomes moot, it must not offer the pliant response: the 
> button must not depress.
> 
> I've seen programs that make moot buttons disappear alltogether, and the 
> effect of this is ghastly. The supposedly Rock-of-Gibraltar-like toolbar 
> becomes this skittish, tentative idiom that scares the daylights of new 
> users and disorients even those more expereinced (me!)..."

I'm not sure where exactly I come down on the overall question of 
showing the toolbar icons, but I do have one thought that may be worth 
some consideration.

Most of the time when a toolbar icon is grayed out it is because the 
icon doesn't make sense in the current application state. The user can 
change this state, however, and cause the toolbar icon to become active 
again.

One example of this would be a mail client with no messages selected. 
In this state, the reply button does not make sense but as soon as a 
message is selected, there's a proper state for the reply button.

In list view, the toolbar icons are unique for a specific record rather 
than the entire application. The backend user cannot make changes that 
would cause these disabled toolbar icons to be activated (moving records 
in the list may be the one exception).

This means that the disabled toolbar icons don't indicate the current 
record state and instead are a static view of what functions that record 
supports.

Again, not sure exactly where I come down on this RFC but I think there 
are some distinctions between the icons here and a standard application 
toolbar.


More information about the TYPO3-team-core mailing list