Re: [Usability]Re: Killing views [Was: Dealing with files in Gnome]

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 11:00, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:

> Correct, and that is why this behaviour should be made more consistent. I
> remember a thread about this very subject some time ago, not sure if
> anything ever came of it.

Funnily enough, I came across an old email about that from one of the
Sun usability guys the other day too.  He wasn't quite so sure it was a
good idea :)

> Back in '93 we were testing Drag and Drop between documents. The 
> question was "what's the right behavior. Should a standard (no 
> modifier keys) drag: (1) always move, (2) always copy, (3) depend 
> upon the source and destination (like the Finder), or (4) something 
> completely different?"
> 
> Many of the engineers wanted a clear, consistent "drag is always move 
> unless you hold down a modifier key. They said let's get rid of the 
> confusing behavior that the Finder has where a drag to a folder on 
> the same volume is a move while a drag to another volume is a copy. 
> We had long arguments about the relative merits, etc.
> 
> So to settle the issue we built a working application (OpenDoc of 
> course) and had 20+ users come in to try out all the variations (in 
> different order so we could eliminate bias, etc.) When testing the 
> "drag is always a move" version I frequently saw this happen --
> 
> 1. The instructions told the user that we wanted them to create a new 
> document that had a sailboat in it -- and they could find a sailboat 
> in an existing document. The instructions told them to try 
> drag-and-drop. The user would create the new document, open the 
> existing document and drag the sailboat to the new document.
> 
> 2. The next bit of instruction had them add some more content to the 
> new document and then to make a third document with the sailboat. 
> Invariably when they got to this stage they would suddenly notice 
> that the sailboat wasn't in the first document any more and be very 
> confused. After playing around for a while they would figure out what 
> had happened and then CLOSE THE FIRST DOCUMENT WITHOUT SAVING so they 
> would get a revert action!
> 
> They had learned that they could always back out by not saving their changes.
> 
> We finally realized that the user expectation wasn't so simple as we 
> imagined it. They wanted to MOVE their data around easily but never 
> LOOSE data. If a second copy was made when they really only wanted 
> one that was much better than ever loosing it because it was easy to 
> delete the unwanted copy.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems