[PATCH 2/2] Shrink the minimum size for preferences window

Thomas Pfeiffer thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org
Tue Jul 26 04:06:31 PDT 2016


On 25.07.2016 14:07, Miika Turkia wrote:
> Let's have the preferences window as small as possible with the current
> data in it. This should allow people with vertical resolution of 600 to
> use the preferences window.
>
Just a little input from a designer: Although I haven't seen the new layout in 
action, the statement that you want to make a window as small as possible in 
order for it to work with a vertical resolution of 600 sounds a bit dangerous to me.
While making your application work for as wide a range of systems as possible is 
an honorable idea as such, you may risk deteriorating the experience of the vast 
majority of users just to cater to a tiny minority.
In general, giving a dialog more "breathing room" makes for a better user 
experience most of the time. The more cramped a dialog is, the harder it is to 
make out its individual elements, and the less "friendly" it appears overall.

Has Subsurface determined the screen size it wants to support somewhere? If not, 
you should, and you should make that a very conscious decision.
600 vertical pixels sounds like a quite low resolution to still support in a 
desktop application nowadays.
If you look at for example the w3schools statistics [1], 600px or lower vertical 
resolution just makes up 3.3% of internet users. Assuming that the population of 
Subsurface users is similar to the sample of these statistics, you'd risk 
deteriorating the experience of 96.7% of users for the benefit of 3.3%.

I don't mean to tell you what to do, just to provide a word of caution.
Cheers,
Thomas

[1] http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_display.asp


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