| Re: [platform-debug-dev] alternate icon for terminate |
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One theory someone here has is that because the Terminate button is red and Suspend is a softer color (yellow-ish), the user's attention is drawn to the Terminate button. They see
a button that conveys the notion of "stop". To them, stop is the complement of "run". And thus the unfortunate newbie outcome I described. An unintentional terminate may not seem like a terrible waste of time, but in the embedded world, a launch can be a non-trivial
operation.
So, to answer your question, perhaps using the same color for Terminate and Suspend would stop drawing the user's attention to the former. I just looked at, arguably, the most popular desktop debugger in the C/C++ world and it has both buttons in the same, neutral color (blue). Honestly, this is all subtle stuff, and I'm not asking the Platform to change a decade-long metaphor if there really isn't a problem. As best I was asking that it be configurable. However, I personally think changing the colors as I mentioned might improve the situation adequately. You're right about the X being used throughout Eclipse for another concept, and so I concur that we shouldn't use it for Terminate. And if everyone thinks our theory is crazy, I'm fine with that too. Again, we can change the icon in our platform sources. I just wanted to check with the community first. John From: platform-debug-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx [platform-debug-dev-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxx] on behalf of Pawel Piech [pawel.piech@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Monday, August 06, 2012 11:22 PM To: Eclipse Platform Debug component developers list. Subject: Re: [platform-debug-dev] alternate icon for terminate Hi Jonh,
I haven't seen any complaints in our product, but I have to admit that I personally find the icon a little confusing. That said, and "X" is used to denote a remove action throughout Eclipse so it's not a good candidate. Do you have any ideas on how to keep the existing stop button analogy but make it less confusing for your users (e.g. accentuate the borders). Cheers, Pawel On 08/06/2012 03:45 PM, Cortell John-RAT042 wrote: First-time CodeWarrior users sometimes hit the Terminate debug action button thinking it's the Suspend action. Yes, there's a suspend button next to Terminate, so this is clearly user error. Still, to the developer who just spent ten minutes launching and setting up an embedded debug session only to see his session suddenly terminate when all he wanted to do was suspend it, the mea-culpa is hard to come by. We think having a big red X instead of the red square represent Terminate would help reduce the likeliness of this type of mistake. It's very easy for us to replace the gif/png for the action in our version of Platform Debug. However, I wanted to check to see if anyone else has experienced this user behavior and would like to see this at least be easily configurable. John |