Re: About Panels - aka lynching time

["Erick Woods" <erick gnomepro com>]

On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> On Tue, 2003-11-04 at 11:38, Rob Adams wrote:
> > Basically I think that the one thing that should definitely, 100%
> > positively always remain consistent among GNOME distributions is the
> > "foot" icon in the gnome menu.  I realize that this is usually the first
> > thing that people change when they go about branding their gnome
> > distribution, but I think that having this icon changing from desktop to
> > desktop really hurts user consistency.
>
> I'd take a lot of convincing on that. It's a _foot_, for starters. ;-)

That should be as simple as an example in the Windows world - "click start".
Every user can do it, every user has a start button that is visible.

This is a usability and a support issue.  Try telling a user to click on the
foot - it's not as easy to get them to do as "click start".

It would be helpful if the foot menu looked like a button (like the show
desktop button) and had some text on it.  Microsoft doesn't have a monopoly
on the word "Start", it would at least be familiar.  A pref should exist to
disable the text.

Distributors could then change the icon to a logo and leave the text alone.
That gives support a target that isn't going to change, at least within a
language.

My 2¢

Erick Woods
erick gnomepro com
http://www.gnomepro.com/