[thelist] Please give me UI modification suggestions!

Tom Dell'Aringa pixelmech at yahoo.com
Tue Jul 9 11:00:01 CDT 2002


Hey all,

I posted this yesterday, but the description was not good and it was
late in the day. One more try.

I have been asked to make some changes to some controls we are
working on. Start by viewing a small shot of them here:

http://www.doctormusic.net/tom/need_feedback.gif

The project is IE5+ only -

As you can see its an "equalizer" type control, if you were to click
in the center, the highlight would move there - kind of a bar graph
thing. (Whether you like the idea or not, we're past the point of no
return on that one).

These controls (stick with the "pitch" one for example) control a 3D
view of a VML/SVG object that is above it.

So clicking halfway down the pitch control will set the pitch to 45
degrees (halfway between 0 - 90)

They want some kind of visual feedback on the controls (rightly so)
so that the user has some frame of reference before they click
(instead of just trial and error.)

Ideas so far:

1 - Tickmarks, similar to a old time radio or  the tick marks on a
guitar amplifier.

2 - Extending the "block" up for various values (for example, the 45
degree value) above the rest (so the taller ones are more noticeable
as 'landmark' settings). The top part of the block could be a
different color and could even include (albeit a very small) value,
such as '45'.

3 - Some kind of gradient showing a change as you move along the
control. Probably graded from center out.

What do you all think or do you have any other ideas? I'm very open
to suggestions. The control is really too small to put any values on
it.

The control is built with 21 styled spans written out with a document
write. There is a background behind it. (I can't post a URL, its on a
dev server, and its intranet only anyway).

Also, I have also been asked to maybe use "Tooltips" for
each tick...what do you think about that? I've implemented it no
problem and it doesn't seem to get in the way.

Tom


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