Re: GUADEC Hacking

[Kalle Vahlman <kalle vahlman gmail com>]

On 4/14/05, Alan <alan ufies org> wrote:
> The issues I see as far as the feel of speed when starting my system
> isn't once you're logged in and your session is restoring (my session is
> to start nothing on login), but before, after I've typed my password
> into gdm and hit enter, and the system just seems to sit there, then
> eventually load the splash screen, sit some more, load some icons, sit,
> then my desktop appears.

The question here is which way the user perception of time passing is
quicker. You can clock it all you want, but the thruth is that if the
user feels it is slow, it does not matter if it is 3 or 10 seconds.

Waiting around just whirling some throbber is the next-to-worse thing to do.

Giving the user a menu but not the ability to launch a program at the
normal rate is not good either. It does feel a bit faster presumably,
since you can actually do something in the middle of the waiting
period, but it still pisses people off and possibly gives the started
program a bad name without a real reason.

The ultimate fix for these is, of course, make the programs work instantly :)

In the meanwhile, it would be interesting to see how people would
react to some distraction while loading the desktop. Show them some
(randomized) fullscreen animation or something until the base desktop
is ready for use (panel, nautilus and applets running).

And before you say "but it will take longer to start up", I realize
that. The issue here is the user perception, *not* the actual loading
time. But it would be interesting to see how users react.

> *That* is the issue that I think needs to be
> worked on (or at least, the one that I think is outside of the users
> control (ie: not starting a bunch of stuff in your session).

I think it would be worth it to actually separate the GNOME loading
and user session loading visually in some way, so the users will know
or can guess that if it takes a minute to load the desktop, it *might*
be the 100 or so mozilla windows saved in their session (so something
they can fix) and not GNOME itself.

-- 
Kalle Vahlman, zuh iki fi