[Epiphany] Re: [Usability] User defined metadata (was: epiphanytoolbar/bookmarks)

[Daniel Borgmann <spark-mailinglists web de>]

On Sun, 2003-06-01 at 03:14, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> This is quite an extreme case ... not sure how many real users will need
> it but ... It was an interesting challenge, so I did a quick self test
> on it.
> I thought a more generic solution to the far/near problem was to allow
> quality metadata in epiphany. Which in practice means to allow the user
> to rate bookmarks like in rhythmbox or (read only) on some web sites.
> Not sure if this actually necessary but it's an interesting feature at
> least.
> (I didnt code it but I tried to simulate ...)
> 
> Approximative results:
> 
> Mozilla
> 
> Step 1: Creating the bookmarks hierarchy in mozilla and adding 3 far and
> 3 near Consultant companies. ~ 3 minutes
> (I'll do describe the pain it was to organize them, I didnt remember it
> was so difficult ;))
> Step 2: Open one by one 3 near sites. First time 40s, after some
> training 20s
> 
> Epiphany
> 
> Step 1: File 6 bookmarks, with title: Consulting - Name of the company
> in the default Work category. ~2 minutes. (Another option could have
> been to put the Consulting word in an ipotetical notes textview.)
> Step 2: Open bookmarks editor, select Work topic (maybe necessary if you
> have other bookmarks with Consulting in it), type con. Double click on
> the bookmarks one by one. 20s first time, 10s after some traning.

Ok, putting the category in the subject might be a solution. But it
doesn't solve the problem that you are forced to use your keyboard and
to remember your categories (unless you scroll through all the entries).

Using a rating/priority setting might be simpler for easy classification
by the user, but it's not very flexible and it wouldn't be that easy to
"filter" a list for a certain priority (especially if you can't remember
which rating you used to mean what).

Sure, the example was a corner case but in general, I think that further
classification could be quite useful. A more simple example would be a
Topic "Gaming", I could add a field "Game" and whenever a bookmark is
about a certain game I could set it. Now when I want to find bookmarks
about a certain game, I could open the Gaming topic and select the
gamename from the Game filter, without using the keyboard and very
convenient. While I don't use this kind of classification yet, this is
basically only because it's so cumbersome with submenus (as you
described) and not possible at all with Epiphany. But if it's done in a
really powerful and flexible way with metadata, I could very well
imagine to use it heavily to file larger bookmark collections. It might
be a killer feature.
Don't forget that songs in Rhythmbox are already highly classified with
song title, artist, genre and album. Add rating to this and you can't
really classify a song any further. With bookmarks it is not that easy
however because they can be about everything. I would argue that
bookmarks are almost as arbitrary as local files.

> I'll add that I felt very hard both editing the tree and accessing all
> the submenus levels. In epiphany I had to perform only very simple
> actions, clicking and typing basically.
> (You can imagine how fun is to Bookmarks->Jobs->Near->Consulting for
> each site you want to visit.)

I completely agree that using submenus is neither fast nor very
convenient, but I'm worried that forcing the user to type and remember
the words he used isn't any better (unless you are just testing so you
know exactly what you are looking for).

I think the question is: Is this unnecessary because users usually don't
use it or do users usually don't use it because it doesn't work very
well with sub topics?

Daniel


P.S.: Hopefully you had read my entire original mail or the reply I
wrote to the linked posting, not the linked posting itself. Otherwise
you would have missed my actual suggestion. :-)