Re: slab menu

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 19:01 -0500, JP Rosevear wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 18:13 +0000, Calum Benson wrote:
> > You should see the state of the Start menu on my wife's Windows laptop,
> > it takes up almost the whole screen, and it's not even in alphabetical
> > order :)  But she says she has no interest in streamlining it, and
> > wouldn't know how to anyway.
> 
> I'm not really getting the counter argument here - rhat she has no
> interest in streamlining it implies it works for her.  I think
> alphabetical is a bad idea any how because it destroys the spacial
> aspect of memory.  By default it gets appended, but you can re-order
> them.
> 
> Everyone seems to have the impression this was just thrown together with
> no user testing, which is definitely not true.  See test data on
> betterdesktop.org
> 
> http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Data
> Task: Find the file MITBlueprints.PDF
> Task: Find the folder "Building Sites"
> Task: Determine what was the last image you edited
> Task: Find out if your computer is online
> Task: Find a copy of "The Frog Prince"
> ... more
> 
> The analysis reports are being polished and finalized for release.
> 
> If Sun has some metrics or test data on hierarchical menus, it would be
> great to look through. 

I don't want to disparage the actual usability testing you guys
have been doing, because it's important and we need more of it.
But I do want to point out that those tests are, for the most
part, orthogonal to the majority of the complaints this thread
has seen about the slab menu.

By and large, people who have complained about the slab menu
have said that accessing stuff from it is a slow process that
doesn't lend itself well to long-term spacial memory.

By contrast, the tests on betterdesktop.org generally test for
feature discoverability.  You take people with varying degrees
of experience and ask them to complete some given task.  They're
asked to complete this task once, and only once.  So you're only
testing how well they can figure things out the first time.

First-time feature discoverability is very important, but it's
not the totality of usability.

--
Shaun