Michael van der Gulik squeakml@gulik.co.nz wrote:
Tim Rowledge wrote:
karl karl.ramberg@chello.se wrote:
David T. Lewis wrote:
I hope you tape it on the right side.
No! The LEFT side; text usually ends up bunching on the left side (in left to right languages at least) so this note, like scrollbars, should go on the left.
It feels more natural to have the scrollbar on the right. I'm right-handed.
Being right-handed is an obvious problem that we need to overcome since clearly only us left-handers are in our right minds.
If I flick through paper, I'll use the right-hand side of the paper to flick through. Ditto for most physical devices; having controls on the right-hand side is easier for me.
We have to be careful what metrics we use to decide upon 'correct'.
Purely emulating physical outer reality is often not very effective except to make it 'intuitive' to marketing people. A software system is really supposed to make it _better_ than reality, otherwise why not write our messages in pencil on scraps of paper and tie them to a pigeon?
One of the important metrics that ought to be used is how long a task takes once one is reasonably familiar with it; after all after a few emails we should be able to go a bit beyond the fake-writing-a-letter and fake-putting-it-into-an-envelope idiom. There is a clear need to make the learning curve as short as practical but attempting to make it flat and then limiting experienced users to the same kindergarten approach is terribly wasteful.
My expectation - and I happily admit it should be measured properly before it is accepted as established fact, send me money to run the study - is that since text (especially code, which we on this list spend a good deal of time editing) tends to bunch up on the left we would have our attention in that area most of the time. Moving the mouse around to select as part of editing would mean it was normally at the left and so access to the scrollbar would be faster (Fitz's Law applies reasonably well here) if it were on the left as well. This same closeness to the centre of attention is why contextual menus can be so much better than menubars, as well as the vast distances one need to move the dratted thing on a 30" screen,
Of course, there are other scrolling and control actions to be considered along with all this; key based scrolling is likely to be more convenient during text input for most people. Command keys can be much faster than a menu with a little experience, at least for a small well thought out group of keys.
Sadly, I know of no studies that point to a way to help cure your right-handedness :-)
tim -- Tim Rowledge, tim@sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim Use GOTOs only to implement a fundamental structure.