First, thanks for working on this. Please understand the following as constructive criticism only.
I have some usability concerns with the new design:
1. I agree with MattW that the context menus are not discoverable. Additionally they are hardly keyboard accessible. Maybe you could add a +/- icon (like the one found next to collapsed trees) that triggers the appearance of a new row containing the (keyboard-accessible) text fields of the old layout. The same action should then also be triggered by the same keys as used in trees (left and right cursor). You could keep the context menus on the labels as an alternative, though.
2. The play/pause and cancel buttons are too small and as such worse than the old Cancel button (which is much bigger). Fitts's law tells us that size (in combination with distance) is the important factor for successfully reaching a target using the mouse cursor. In your new design you only have one button, despite your "white space wasted" argument (one of Vladimir's points). I'd transform the play/pause icon into a button with changing label and icon (maybe becoming Restart when the download finishes). See my next point for the Cancel icon.
3. The Close button is ambiguous, especially when combined with the icon. It's obvious that it will close the window but it doesn't tell by itself that the download will continue in the background (unless the download window is the last SeaMonkey window, of course). I think people could easily confuse Close with Cancel. I suggest renaming Close to Continue in Background, adding a Cancel button (see point 2) and moving the icon over to that one. Once the download finishes Cancel would transform into Open, maybe with an additional Open Folder.
4. I like skierpage's idea of combining the remaining/elapsed counters in one row. If doing it on the two ends of the progress bar is too hard it would be enough the do it in one sentence, though.
5. I also like Eduardo's suggestion of using a white background for the Download Manager, as in the old one, the Bookmark Manager etc. After all this part of the window is active and offers some actions to the user (selecting a row, opening the context menu on it, resuming/pausing/restarting downloads etc.).
Final word to Mr. OldSkool: openly asking for comments like KaiRo is doing here is hardly "simply doing what the developers want with no regard for users", no? Unfortunately we don't have the manpower to do usability studies and neither do we have someone specifically working on usability, doing mockups etc. What's left is the developers who are usually not experts in this field. In the end someone has to come up with something, otherwise there is no progress (pun intended). It's not perfect, yet the best we can do until we're shown a better way.
13.04.2009 18:54