New metric
July 10, 2007
Inspired by the work on my report I want to introduce a new metric: “Screenshotness”. This metric applies to dialog panes and is defined as follows:
The screenshotness is the number of screenshots needed to capture the entire dialog.
To give an example: The current KDE print dialog has a screenshotness of one if you don’t include the tabs brought up by the “Properties” button. If you include that button the screenshotness goes up to 6: the original pane and the five tab panes.
The printing dialog of Gnome has a screenshotness of 4 as there are 4 tab panes in the dialog
Now comes the real beauty of this metric: The Mac OS X printing dialog can reach arbitrarily high screenshotness-values. Believe me.
July 10, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Excellent! And your new funny metric is a really useful one too! It also relates to the easiness of documenting an app. More screenshots you need, more difficult it is to keep the attention of the reader of your docu focused.
Do you see a relation (proportional or inverse proportional) between the number of screenshots and real world ease of use, e.g. with the MacOS printing dialogs?