During Eclipse Plugin Developement training, I always end JFace Wizards session with these guidelines:
- Wizards should be aimed for minimal user interaction
- Wizard pages can be filled with meaningful defaults
- When a Wizard is shown it should not contain any errors. They should appear only after a user interaction
- Present Errors/Warnings in the tab order of the fields
- When a task is split into steps, a wizard page can model a step and shouldn't be doing more things
- Don't create pages that needs scrolling. In general if a wizard's height is greater than its width, probably it needs a review
- Total number of Wizard pages should be ~ 5
The options in the first page falls into three categories:
- Resource: Project name, location & working sets
- Compiler: Source folders
- Runtime: JRE & Execution env.
Ideally the first page should just give the resource related options and the others can be pushed to second page/elsewhere. Since the second page allows the user to configure the JRE, source & binary folder, I guess we are not loosing any functionality if we get rid of those options. If the first page is cleaned up to have only resource related options, this is how it would look like:
in contrast to the current:
Posts
4 comments:
Have you filed a bug report?
That are some good thoughts. If you talk about 5 pages it is maybe a good idea to have a list of page titles on the left side of the wizard. A click on a title should make the wizard jump to the according page. Assuming that the wizard has good defaults you can finish it fast. Even if you don't use direct linking it helps. You can see what is coming next and decide if you really need to see all pages.
Usually I don't like too many mouse clicks. That means it is important to consider if too many pages or information popups really help the user or just make their work slower and annoying.
It's not directly related to wizards but I slowly get sick of all the software packages telling me in a popup dialog that there is a new version for download. Sometimes I think my computer works more for itself than being a helpful tool.
True, PDE is a offender in this area recently too.
Sorry guys. Somehow all these three comments were "found" to be spams by Blogger. I was reviewing the spam comments and found them now only.
Post a Comment