When should we use the pointing finger cursor in desktop user interfaces?
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Description

...According to various usability sources, only for clickable links, just like web browsers. Example sources:

The reason given is that underlined text does not visually suggest "I'm clickable!" so a cursor-based hint is needed. And a corollary is that it's not needed for other clickable elements because they do visually suggest clickability.

Extracting this into a general principle yields the following:

"Use a pointing finger cursor for a UI element which is clickable but does not look clickable, if when clicked it will perform an action or navigate the user to another location."

However if we apply that principle to our software, that leads us to the conclusion that a lot of things should show that cursor. For example:

  • Menu text and items within menus
  • Flat ToolButtons
  • Files and folders in Dolphin and Folder View when using the default Single-Click option
  • App launchers and pinned apps on the Panel
  • App status notifiers/launchers in the system tray
  • Window thumbnails in Task Manager Tooltips
  • The user avatar in Kickoff
  • Images in Gwenview
  • Expandable list items

As an alternative, we could change all of the above elements to look visually clickable instead of using a pointing finger cursor for them. Of course this presents several problems:

  1. Making them look clickable would entail drawing a bunch more frames and making many things look more buttonlike, which could look visually heavy and overwhelming.
  2. Plasma and KDE software are themable; there's no guarantee that the user will be using a theme that ensures visual clickability. Some themes are very minimalistic with no frames and no buttonlike appearance for anything.

However using a pointing finger in all these places might also be kind of weird and nonstandard. It would result in many UI elements having a pointing finger, but many still only showing a default arrow cursor and I suspect people would complain about inconsistency and lack of a clear principle. In the end we would be pushed towards making everything that's clickable for anything more than selectability use the pointing finger cursor.


I'm not sure what to conclude here. :/

ngraham created this task.Jul 14 2020, 2:26 PM
ngraham renamed this task from When should we using the pointing finger cursor in desktop user interfaces? to When should we use the pointing finger cursor in desktop user interfaces?.
felixernst added a subscriber: felixernst.EditedJul 14 2020, 7:31 PM

I think the rule is that things that are interactive give feedback on hover. The pointy finger cursor is the weakest form of such feedback because it doesn't communicate the size of the click target or what will happen on click.
I don't think we need the pointy finger cursor but should instead give proper hover feedback and this is AFAIK already what we are aiming for.

Yeah that's a good point about hover effects signifying this as well. I hadn't considered that. Makes a lot of sense.

All right, it looks like we should use a combination of visible hover effects and the default arrow cursor instead of using the finger cursor for everything other than link text.

ngraham closed this task as Resolved.Jul 16 2020, 3:14 AM