Re: [Usability] Suggestion for the actual UI of GTK+'s New FileSelector

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

If I am in a very deep tree, say, 64 levels deep, and the PathView has
the last few folders in view, how do I scroll immediately to the first,
or thirty-second, or some other random position, in the "list" of
folders? It doesn't have a scrollbar, so I can't just drag and be there.
It seems to only have the < and > arrow buttons. I really don't want to
wait forever to have the list scroll all the way back to the beginning,
so I can click on "/", while holding my mouse button down on a tiny
button with an arrow in it. The PathView also has much less surface area
than the Option Menu list of folders, so it's more likely that the user
will hit the wrong thing accidentally. The PathView also only has text
in the buttons, which creates inconsistency and more chance for
confusion. Icon->file associations greatly improve the speed at which
one can find what they are looking for.

The "List View" option also seems extraneous. Is there any reason to
have the file selector present any view other than a list? And is there
any special reason to only use mime type icons, and present pertinent
data in a column structure, in the list view? It seems to me that having
thumbnails and better expression of pertinent data in the file selector
will greatly improve the user experience.

Telling someone that X is more usable than Y, probably because they
haven't used X, is very useful. If I look at X and have no idea what
its behaviour is like, how is that more usable? Providing something that
is very similar to what people are used to using, seems much more usable
to me, than providing them with something completely different. Try
finding a middle-aged person near you (40-50 years old), and teaching
them to read Chinese or Japanese, and you will see why the horizontal
layout is so important. it doesn't have to be a totally horizontal
layout, but your mock-up has too much vertical bias to be immediately
useful by a majority of the world's PC users, I think. There's just too
much going on, and too much to think about, from looking at your dialog.

-- dobey

On Mar , 2004-01-06 at 20:51, Eugenia Loli-Queru wrote:
> FYI:
> http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5582
> Please read the article for full explanation as to why things are the way
> they are in the mockup.
> 
> Suggestions (but mostly source code :-) are welcome.
> 
> Eugenia