Tango conference 2008 - Tomasz Stachowiak DDL talk

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Nov 19, 2008 at 7:25 PM, Saaa <empty at needmail.com> wrote:
> Are you going to freak out if I tell you about my plan to have a few buttons
> behave like the following:
> if you click on one of them it is possible to select more of them by not
> releasing your button and moving over them.
> Or should I just not call them buttons anymore ? :D

Sounds ok as long as you give them give them a different appearance
from normal buttons.

About the original comment, it sounded to me like you were going to
change the behavior just because it was a pain to program the "normal"
way, and then you were rationalizing that it was ok because it's just
a game.  Sorry if I misinterpreted.  If you have an actual reason to
think some behavior will make for a better user experience then great.
Go for it.  I certainly don't mean to say that every UI has to act
like standard WIMP to be usable.  But if you're going to deviate for
from the norm there should be a good reason to.  I do agree that games
are an interesting place to experiment with alternative UIs since
people don't necessarily expect them to look and feel just like
Windows.  Whereas if you start getting creative with the UI in, say, a
data entry app, users will probably want to throw things at you.

--bb