Xaviju Julián <xaviju@...360...> writes:
That was really helpful. We added a new version of our tools bar proposal
with your suggestions.
Be very careful when you decide to combine tools. with today's screen sizes there is plenty of vertical space so there is no reason to collapse similar tools into a single icon. Collapsing similar tools may make the application less intimidating and help focus newbies on the important tools, but it decrease discoverability. Also, consider which tools are used often. It make s sense to collapse a number of tools if only one of them is used often and the others aren't, but if two or more are used often, collapsing them into a single icon and asking the user to click and hold to switch will seriously annoy users if they'll have to do it all the time. This is something that I always found time-consuming with Adobe applications - they have all the vector editing tools combined into a single icon - and this is one of the main reasons why I work with Inkscape in a tight production environment even though I have a legal copy of Illustrator.
The one tool combo that would most hinder my work with this design is the shape tool. Circles and rectangles (and to a lesser degree stars/polygons) are something I use so often that it would seriously hinder my work if I had to switch between them.
There is one option that might achieve the best of both worlds - if it was possible for a user to expand collapsed items permanently into a number of toolbar icons.