Re: Killing Views Part 2 - The return of the Usabilty study

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

Hi

Here's my humble proposition to solve this issue:

I think Nautilus should have the possibility to show thumbnails and
previews of files at the same time.

For example, if you are browsing a bunch of pictures, you should have a
preview of the first picture on the top of the window and a row full of
thumbnails of other files. Like that:

            ------------
            |          |
            |          |
            |          |
            |          |
            ------------

       ----  ----  ----  ----
       |  |  |  |  |  |  |  |
       ----  ----  ----  ----

The big preview should fit the size of Nautilus' window whereas
thumbnails should have a fixed size.

I think this template could be used for any type of files (text, RTF
files, HTML, PS/PDF, music using an embedded player instead of the
preview, videos etc...). Different file types could even be mixed in the
thumbnails row.

This solution would have the following advantages:

 - I feel that it's easier to understand that the preview is read-only
if it is presented this way (that's just a personal feeling though)
 - It's easier to navigate through files while previewing them (no need
to go back after viewing each file).
 - It is the way WinXP does it for pictures ;)

What do you think of that ?

Le sam 31/05/2003 �0:08, Mark Finlay a �it :
> We recently had a discussion about killing nautilus internal file
> views. And it was one of those issues that I wished I had some
> usability statistics to back it up.
> 
> Today I've been reading the usability review that sun did of
> Gnome 1.2 and came accross this page:
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/file_management.html
> 
> Users were confused by the read only view of a text file and 
> said things like:
> "I was expecting a word processing app to open [the file]...weird."
> "I was confused when the text file opened in a browser type thing."
> 
> The sun reccomendation was to make it more clear that the file is
> read only, but I would say that it makes more sense to remove the
> internal viewing of files in nautilus all together, now that nautilus is
> no longer used as a web browser.
> 
> There is no real benefit to viewing a text file or image in nautilus
> AFAICT, but there are definately drawbacks, and as that usability
> study shows, it causes user frustration and confusion.
> 
> I don't want to start another holy war. But I would love to get a
> response from the nautilus maints for or against this. The rest of us
> can argue to we go blue in the face, but if the maints aren't listening
> then there is no point.
> 
> Thanks for you time,