Quote: (Originally Posted by
brockbr)
Breals,
I assume the Edit button would open the sliders as though editing that particular line?
My concern with doing that is that the UI would get VERY busy VERY quick. You don't like just editing the values right there in text? This is actually a HUGE feature because it lets you play what-if's (change the 25 to a 20 for time and instantly see the result).
The iPhone interface is actually VERY different, and I don't want to spoil the fun, but let's just say you can't tip your
monitor 
Hi,
Yes, it could be a bit busy but then again, maybe you wouldn't have more than one depth/gas at a time. I usually plan square profiles for my tech dives as do my friends. I just walked my non-diver visual designer thru this cold and he came out with the same reaction.
However, my first reaction was that you had the sliders and then couldn't use them again, hence the need for an edit button. Plus, having a slider the computes the right values to build text in the correct syntax, keeps the learning curve down. IMHO I don't like making the user learn to do something if it isn't necessary, i.e. correct text syntax for entering dive profiles. Power-users might just type in the text but it took me a few times to get it right and I would put myself in the expert category for these types of things.
In the flash/dhtml calcs that we build for our site, usability showed that people wanted to be guided and having something intuitive, like a slider or radio button to make it easy. The slider interface is also intuitive for doing what if because it provides a feedback mechanism that the trains the user on when values change.
One of the interesting things we found through research is that people expect an explicit action to change something. We had a graph that calculated your tax liability for planning, but it didn't ask the user to confirm/submit the changes as the graph would just update it self as you typed. The test subjects didn't get it that it would change itself. but when we change it to a OK/Submit it changed things.
The other thing that we did was to also allow the users to type in the value that the slider would fill out if they wanted to type it in. We learned that one from Adobe, if you look at the color selector slider in Photoshop, there is a field that the slider updates but you can also just type in the value.
Please don't confuse my feedback with criticism, I'm just trying to give you feedback and have some passion around it.
Yeah, I can just imagine the iphone experience, perhaps shaking it to clear the profile like the Convert application does?
- Bill