Re: [STYLE GUIDE] Spinner revisited

Hi;

I'm back, sorry for the unavoidable absence - I was out.

Perhaps home/end should move to first/last entry until you start editing 
  the current entry [if it is an editable field] after that, home/end 
would take you to the beginning/end of the current entry.

Spinners are meant to have short entries in them in my experience. I 
agree with Joseph, maybe it should be left/right [assumes horizontal 
orientation] should move you in the current entry and home/end, up/down, 
page up/down should spin the spinner. [1] It would seem to me it is 
better to offer large decrement jumps to quickly change to higher/lower 
values than to restrict the user to using arrow keys.

Having said this, Windows is a known paradigm and it's a lot less 
programming to just support up/down, left/right arrow keys... [2]

[1] seems best to me if spinners might frequently contain many entries. 
[2] is probably best if spinners are typically meant contain few 
entries. Pulling a break number out of my wazoo, maybe 10 or less 
typically contained in a spinner favors [2] while regularly 10 or 
greater favors [1].

Anyone know the max number of entries recommended to be contained in 
spinners?

ej





Joseph Scheuhammer wrote:
> 
>>
>> The spinner is an input field with associated up and down arrows ... 
>> home and end are currently used within an input field to move the 
>> caret to the beginning or end of the field.  Will this confuse people?
> That's the key:  do users perceive this widget as a text input field or 
> as a spinner (or, I suppose, as a composite thing called "spinner" that 
> has a text field as one of its parts)?  What does an AT report to the 
> user given the @role 'spinbutton'?
> 
> If it is perceived qua spinner and not at all as a text field, then, I 
> would think, users won't expect home and end to behave as cursor 
> navigation keystrokes.
> 
> If it is perceived as a text input field and home/end are commonly used 
> to move to the ends of the textbox, then the style guide is problematic.
> 
> I don't know what users' mental model is for spinners.  My experience is 
> that spinners are rarely used.  I found one in the Mac "Energy Saver" 
> system preferences "Schedule..." section, and another in "Date and 
> Time", where spinners are used to set time values.  None of home, end, 
> pageup, nor pagedown did anything.  Left/right cursor keys moved left 
> and right within the text box, up/down increased/decreased the value, 
> and other keystrokes allowed entering values directly.
> 
> If the style guide is changed, then I suggest that keystrokes for 
> quickly attaining the min and max values of the spinner's range.  That's 
> the point of the home/end currently -- to navigate quickly to the ends 
> of the range.
>

Received on Tuesday, 8 July 2008 20:09:08 UTC