On Friday, November 16, 2012 23:23:30 Djuro Drljaca wrote: > the problem with alignment to center is that you can't know where the text > will be positioned on the screen.
a small nitpick: you also don't know where it will be positioned when left aligned. it is only the frame that is aligned; the contents appear somewhere therein. that said, it is true with a predictable frame anchor point you can more accurately guess where the text will appear. > When the text starts approximately at the > vertical line where you last click was there is less effort needed to find > the text, if it is aligned to center you must first wait for it to fully > appear on the screen and then follow the text to the left until you find > the start of text so that you can start reading :) this is not how human visual recognition works. we don't track text to left to find margins, we perceive the larger blocks (edges) and jump to them. that is why consistent alignment between elements is so important: it allows our edge detection and grouping processing to work to our benefit. i would not be surprised if there is some small time difference between predictable left anchoring and dynamic center anchoring. however, it is also unlikely that anyone reacts to the pixel even with left anchoring; center anchoring in practice does not move the text placement that much either. in fact, it is probably well within the placement error delta for left anchored positioning .. and so i would also not be surprised if there is no meaningful time difference. now, whatever time difference there may be is probably utterly insignificant in practice. (i say probably because i don't have data from a study to throw at this right now, not because i have reason to doubt the statement based on my understanding of human perception.) which means we can probably afford to favour beauty over perfectly optimized function. a perfectly usage-optimized interface (physical or computer) can create lower satisfaction if it looks uglier than a slightly less perfect specimen which is more aesthetically pleasing. welcome to the annoying world of making people happy :) (btw, did you notice that plasma tooltips have had centered text for a while, though it was previously left aligned? the difference in pixel placement is very small in most cases, but looks and visually "feels" better. so far nobody has said that the tooltips are harder / slower to read.) -- Aaron J. Seigo
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