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phetsims / blackbody-spectrum

"Blackbody Spectrum" is an educational simulation in HTML5, by PhET Interactive Simulations.
GNU General Public License v3.0
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User suggestion: Auto scale on the vertical axis #126

Open oliver-phet opened 2 years ago

oliver-phet commented 2 years ago

image

DianaTavares commented 2 years ago

I love this idea of an autoscale option that is not the default. I will discuss it with the design team.

DianaTavares commented 2 years ago

This is an idea of how to attend to this user suggestion:

Add a fourth checkbox to the checklist located next to the Blackbody Temperature slider. Label this new checkbox as Auto-scaling (see image below), and once it is marked, it allows the user to freely change the temperature without having to manually use the zoom-in or zoom-out buttons in the axes. The graph would automatically scale itself so the user can visualize the entire curve. image

The position of this option is at the bottom because we want that users use it after learning how everything else works. Now, we can consider two ways the auto-scaling can be done:

1) While the user moves the slider, the shape and size of the curve remain the same but the upper and the lower limits of the yand the x axis change at the same time to adjust to the new graph values. We think that the change in the numbers that represent the limit of the axes in the graph, the little lines in the x-axis that represent intervals, and the size of the visible spectrum is enough clues to let the users know that the graph is changing when the temperature change.

2) While the user moves the slider, the graph changes as it usually does; however when the user releases the slider, the graph scales itself to fit the entire curve (including appropriate limits).

I know that the design is the assy part. @ariel-phet, what do you think? a developer can work in this?

ariel-phet commented 2 years ago

@DianaTavares if the graph is autoscaling I think it should autoscale while the user moves the slider, I think it will be an odd interaction if you move to a new temperature and the graph does not scale until you release the control.

As for having a developer work on this, I would suggest you bring it up at status or design meeting and ask @kathy-phet

DianaTavares commented 2 years ago

I discover that Illustrator has the effect of zooming in and out where the tickmarks appear and disappear. I am just pasting a gif here to use it as a reference for the design:

zoom