48303 - Please,please,please make that little arrow bigger on Back/Forward button [modern skin]

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 39487

(SeaMonkey :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Claudius Gayle]

This bug is sprung from bug 46039

***Overview Description: 

  The little arrows that trigger pop-up/drop-down menus on the Back/Forward button need to be a touch bigger. There should be 
more of a target to click on. I notice that the area that is clickable is actually larger than what looks clickable. Maybe if the visual 
area was just as large as the clickable(or even a little larger) that'd be enough.

***Steps to Reproduce: 

1) Try to mouse to that little arrow w/o having to correct and back up.

Comment 1

[Peter Trudelle]

It should be *much* larger, IMHO.  Please consider Fitt's law, and Schmidt's 
work on the accuracy of hand motions. 
<http://www.cs.ualberta.ca/~mark/c301/performance.html>
Nominating for nsbeta3

Comment 2

[Radha on family leave (not reading bugmail)]

I think ben/german should own this

Comment 3

[Paul Chen]

nav triage team:

reassigning to german to make UI decision

Comment 4

[Peter Trudelle]

Ben has already modeled his buttons on the 'standard', and are much easier
targets, although a little wider wouldn't hurt.

Comment 5

[german]

Making the menu drop marker area larger is a desirable goal for all skins 
regardless of the support for click and hold involved in bug 46039, as brendan 
pointed out there.
Enlarging the drop marker will be covered by the ongoing refinement of the 
'Modern' skin targetted for nsbeta3.

BTW: a problem I noticed with the current classic skin was that the menu button 
drop markers are too far away from the buttons they are supposed to be associated 
with. While the target area needs to be large enough obviously, the menu drop 
marker visuals need to be moved closer to the left. This will avoid them being 
associated with the button to the right of it.

Comment 6

[Peter Trudelle]

The rectangle it is in would have to be made wider in order to move it to the
left, it just barely fits now.  I'm not sure it is a problem, since the button
gets a border when you mouseover the menu, subtly associating the pair.

Comment 7

[hangas]

marking nsbeta3- and closing bug.  The arrow was improved for Modern and will 
probably not change again before we ship.

Comment 8

[Peter Trudelle]

These are still tiny, an order of magnitude smaller than what people are used to
targetting.  Did you mean to close this as 'wontfix'?  Maybe this is fine for
the video game generation, but I still find it too hard to use.  Back to Classic.

Comment 9

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Reopening, since this isn't fixed.

Comment 10

[hangas]

Taking bug.  Feedback on these arrows has been much more positive than negative. 
 If we make these arrows larger we will get feedback that they are too big.  
Anyone want to attach a screen shot of a size they would find usable?

Comment 11

[Peter Trudelle]

Where has your current feedback come from?  Does it represent the target users,
or is it mostly developers and mozilla.org contributors?  Has there been any
usability testing?  I agree that the problem is not 'fixed', but it may already
be too late to really fix it for 6.0.  IMO, by making such design tradeoffs,
we've effectively targetted a younger market at the expense of the bi-focal
boomers. Perhaps thats intentional.

Comment 12

[hangas]

Well I spent part of the day poking at this arrow button and talking to those 
that are using Modern every day.  While most people that I ask about this think 
that little arrow looks good and works fine for them, most of these people are 
young nimble fingered engineer types that could hit an arrow half that size.  I 
also received some feedback today suggesting that this was temporary anyway 
because after N6 we would get the old click and hold menus like 4.x.  Since I 
have not heard that the click and hold menus will appear, and I agree that this 
is one of the most difficult widgets to hit in the interface I too think it 
should be made larger.  If this bug get's rtm++ or even beta3++ then we will make 
it larger.

Comment 13

[Peter Trudelle]

I don't think this bug merits rtm status, or I'd nominate it myself. As long as
us old-timers can still switch to classic without having to click on the head of
a pin, there is at least a workaround.  BTW, we're sticking with our original
plan to never implement the 4.x-style button/menus.

Comment 14

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Attachment: Screenshot of drop-down which is too narrow in the Classic skin

Comment 15

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Nominating for RTM. This is a problem on both Classic and Modern. Fixing it would 
be very easy (on Classic, at least), would be very low risk, and would 
substantially improve the usability of the Back and Forward menus.

Accessibility issue, because not all of us have the vision of a hawk, or the 
steadiness of hand of a brain surgeon.

Also filed bug 53664 for using the button and menu parts of menubuttons as target 
areas for each other.

Comment 16

[Peter Trudelle]

Has Ben already fixed this in his skin?  Classic drop-downs now seem at least as
wide as in other popular Windows applications.  :-)

Comment 17

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

The screenshot I attached was of the Mac Classic skin. The triangle is the same 
size as that in the menubuttons with 16*16 icons found in MS Office 98; but it is 
too narrow for larger buttons, for something which is as regularly used as the 
Back/Forward menus.

The triangle graphic itself looks to be two pixels narrower than the one used in 
IE for Windows; and the image has no padding, whereas the one in IE has 2px 
padding (IIRC) on both sides.

Comment 18

[Peter Trudelle]

Have you checked the latest builds?  It sure looks like Ben has added enough
padding, and the triangles looks bigger than the ones in IE, etc.  I think
Classic is there.

Comment 19

[hangas]

nominating for rtm++ for Peter and others that feel very strongly about this one.  

Comment 20

[Mike Young]

Is this bug a dup of bug 39487 ??
If so, can whoever dups this please make sure that the rtm+ status transferrs
over as well.

Comment 21

[Matthew T (active 1999-2002)]

Well spotted.


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 39487 ***

Comment 22

[Claudius Gayle]

VERIFIED Dupe