Zooming

Hi all, My team within Microsoft Office Labs just posted our latest prototype, Canvas for OneNote. You can download it here at http://www.officelabs.com/canvasforonenote I'd love to get your feedback. Being that it's a prototype, it's not feature rich or complete... and includes a bunch of hacks, too I'd love to know what people think. You can post here, or in our forums on officelabs.com thanks, Nathan

While watching the first video my first question arose: What have driven the decision to use the primary button of the pointing device for zoom in, and the secondary button for zoom out, instead of using the wheel?

In the third video I understood that the user can also use the wheel... and here comes another question: Why having two different ways for zooming? Isn't the user going to lose time in first deciding which type of interaction to use (buttons or wheel) and then interact, instead of having just one consistent way of interacting? ...and one more question: Why having a mode in which the wheel is used for completely different interaction (I refer to the typical way of scrolling through content when a page is 100%), instead of using panning consistently? That's ruining the possibility of having a interface able to provide monotony to the user, don't you think?

Good points, Vladimir. One of the things we've been discussing is that there don't seem to be any consistent guidelines for ZUI usability. One of my hopes for this community site is that we can start to get such things together, perhaps in the form of a pattern language. In fact, I've gone ahead and made a page to get things rolling: http://grou.ps/zooming/wiki/69393

Great feedback, and agree with Ian - standards will be wondeful!. Here's some background to our decisions (none of them we are attached to, it was just for trying the prototype): Why the left mouse button = zoom Looking at a good set of usability data (old, and studies we ran in the lab), majority of people didn't ever try to use the wheel to zoom. In fact, many people don't use the wheel at all. We wanted to make sure people got that this was a zooming surface, so decided to make the default behavior zoom in and right click zoom out. Results: very discoverable, novices and experts alike. Bit hard to digest for some. Right click = zoom out also meant no context menu (you could argue that's good or bad I suppose ). Why wheel, too Wheel just seems to make sense for zooming in/out. Like above, many users don't use or know that. There's a bunch of smarter things we could do to introduce people to zooming (quick tutorial, visual cues, etc). Left/Right click also gave you a better chance to zoom to a specific point, where the wheel seemed better at manual/precise control of where you wanted to zoom. Ideally clicking and wheeling would make it faster to get to the right page (via click), then refine as needed (via wheel). Why the wheel switches modes: This came as a strong user feedback, actually. Since many pages could be long, being able to easily read them is important. People who use the wheel primarily seemed to understand it was for scroll (not zoom) so would try to 'scroll' the document and get a rude suprise of being zoomed out. We guessed people would learn to pan instead, but that's actually pretty taxing when moving a document, and without any guide-rails looks pretty messy (panning in a straight line is really tough). Overall that mode proved to be really good - however I wish we could change the cursor to indicate the mode change. It's very jarring unless you know it's going to happen. Moving forward: While the left/right click in/out helped the learning curve and helped navigate quickly, it lost us Select and Context Menus. We've played with a bunch of different models and haven't found one we love. It was most interesting that people weren't big wheel users, too. Not sure if others have seen that. thanks for the feedback!!