visual ergonomy

[ivan louette]

Just a little help for those who don't use keyboard shortcuts!
Specially When I am tired I am confusing between shadow icon and some others because they also have a shadow !!!
Why not simply remove their shadow like on the example I have attached?

I love Xarax !!!

ivan [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[ivan louette]

Just a little help for those who don't use keyboard shortcuts!
Specially When I am tired I am confusing between shadow icon and some others because they also have a shadow !!!
Why not simply remove their shadow like on the example I have attached?

I love Xarax !!!

ivan [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_smile.gif[/img]

[BobInce]

I concur, this makes perfect sense. Should make the icons easier to recognise quickly which is of course the whole idea of icons.

I can't help but feel that with all the new features, Xara's interface is getting a bit tricky now. In the area of the toolbars, anyway. Line properties could do with being re-arranged somehow; the way the options are spread over the freehand tool, the path tool and the line gallery is quite confusing (and the pen tool is pointless too of course).

Then there's contouring and bevels where are sort of variations on lines. Feathering is very easy to miss hidden on its own toolbar and should be tied in with transparency IMO. The NavBar tool I still don't understand at all; I had expected the states thing to work more like the existing layers/frames arrangement. (Though it's not the sort of tool I'd personally use anyway, I'd rather slice it and write the code myself.)

Having said that, the interface as it stands is still miles ahead of Draw and friends! I guess I'm just a half-empty kind of guy...

[diniel]

Don't know what should be used instead, but I don't like the Shadow icon, it doesn't seem to describe what it can achieve very well.

Also, I think the new Blend icon should be returned back to how it was in Xara 2, the new icon at the moment doesn't look like a blend at all to me. Especially with it being so near to the Quickshapes tool (not expanded? come on Xara!) which also features 3 shapes.

[Mike@Gonzo]

The one bit of Xara I never liked was the toolbar - it looks kind of amateurish and I've never got to grips with what the icons mean. However, since we now all use it, the icons themselves should probably remain unchanged.

BUT! Dropping the shadows would be a good start, they do clutter the design and add nothing to usability. But then, when you see applications such as Lotus Notes you realise that the Xara icons are far from the worst on the market, and they're thankfully laregly free of the animated menus that appear to be catching on. Menus don't need to change colour, animate, fade in and out, have shadows and click when you use them - thay are a navigation aid - nothing more.

Secondly, the icons currently mix coloured icons with greyscale. Now in most user interfaces, greyed out icons normally refer to tools that are unusable in the current situation. A glance at the Xara toolkbar is therefore misleading. All the icons that can be used at a given time should contain some colour. (Some good examples of colour use are Eudora and Microsoft Office, both use a limited palette but the difference between those that work and those that don't is immediately clear).

Thirdly, the little pop-up frame when the mouse rolls over the icon is annoying and unnecessary. If it is there to tell you that the icon is available with a click then Windows already supports the tooltip option. If Xara are worried that the icons merge into one another, then perhaps putting each icon into a square frame (a la Photoshop) is a better solution.

As for the options to the tools, I've never been terribly impressed with the Galleries solution, especially some options remain on the top toolbar.

A cleaner solution would be to use something like the Options window used in Macromedia applications. This is a floating window who's contents change depending on the tool in use. Going to one window to change line widths, fonts and so on is a lot easier than hunting for the right gallery.

But after that lot, thanks for not having an interface like Corel Draw, use a couple of tools and half your monitor is obscured with pop-up windows.

Best wishes.

Mike.