New Comparison screen layout is confusing
Submitted by Casey
Link to original bug (#730385)
Description
When starting the program or initiating a new comparison, three buttons appear in the middle of the window - File Comparison, Directory Comparison, and Version Control View. After clicking Directory comparison, three pull down boxes appear, one under each of the three big buttons. Because each of the pull down boxes is directly underneath and perfectly aligned with the above big buttons, I assumed without thinking about it that each pull down box corresponded ONLY to the button above. I selected a directory with the pull down box below the directory comparison button, but then it took a couple minutes of searching for a way to specify the second directory to compare before I realized I needed to use the pull down box under the file comparison button.
The simplest way that might possibly fix this is to just make each of the three pull down boxes slightly wider or narrower than the buttons, so they don't appear to match exactly to the button above. You could center justify the pull down boxes, but it would probably help even more, to make them appear independent, if you left justified them with the left edge of the file comparison box. This would leave the layout unsymmetrical, but the 3 way comparison checkbox is unsymmetrical anyway.
You could also do something like put a single horizontal line crossing under all three buttons, and a left justified label saying something like "select files or folders to compare".
I hope this helps to make an already excellent program just a tiny bit better.