GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 521122
Make avatars appear to the left of contacts in the contact list
Last modified: 2010-01-16 12:02:15 UTC
The only usable purpose for avatars I can think of is to quickly identify a specific contact in the contact list. That doesn't really fit with the current placement of the avatars, which are aligned on the right side of the list. In the western world at least, people read from left-to-right, and we browse user interfaces in the same direction, making it difficult to quickly find an avatar. I recommend that the avatars be moved to the left of the contact names, and perhaps overlaid with the presence indication icons. A nifty and aesthetic addition would be to "frame" the avatar with a polaroid-like border, although that isn't strictly relevant.
Maybe that could be an option but I don't think that should be the default.
We could merge the avatar with the status icon. For example, for example graying the avatar of contacts who are away or circling the avatar in red if he is unavailable. I would find it easier to have both informations in one place than finding a contact by looking for it's avatar on the right and then following an imaginary line to the other side of the application to see if he is available or not.
I agree with this bug. The current scheme makes it difficult to see which avatars are associated with which names.
Dafydd: perhaps you need a theme with alternating background colours rows? I believe most people will use a narrow window for the contact list and associating contacts with avatar isn't a problem in that situation. (but then that is just another of my personal opinions...) The current scheme is nice as the status icons are neatly aligned under the user own status in the top dropdownbox (as noted by mpt in his usability review).
wontfix?
For me wontfix is fine, yes.
I wontfix it right now; the idea could make sense to lot of people I think. Let's see if Matthew has an advice about this.
Sad if wontfix… Making everything in order to shrink this window is great. So merging avatar and status icône (or adding a small statu icone on the right bottom of the avatar) would be great. Maybe later…
WONTFIX for now. Could be re-opened if we receive some input from usability expert that this could actually improve users experience.
Hello, I give another try to empathy on karmic beta. Same size problem. Look at the screenshot. The screen is 1280x800. As you can see, with french traduction, the contact list is more than 300px wide, 1/4 of the screen. This size is not due to the size of the contact name, but of the size of the top menubar. It looks way too big for me. This is only a list of available windows. One do not need mutch than clic on name to begin a conversation. I put this here since it’s look like the same idear of reducing the size of the windows, but maybe I must put this on another « wishbug ».
Hum, sorry for the non-attachement… I think I’d better ad it to this bug : 586877
*** Bug 607136 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***