Re: Usability (was Re: Yelp)

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

ons 2002-01-30 klockan 04.17 skrev Daniel Carrera:
> I think that there's a big usability problem in GNOME.  It stems
> from the lack of appropriate names for the gnome apps and utils.  Think
> about a new user confronted with the following names.  Could he/she guess
> what the app was?"
> 
> *  Yelp.
> *  Everybudy.
> *  Evolution.
> *  Gnumeric.
> 
> You see my point.
> 
> As documentation writers, we are trying to make GNOME accessible to
> people.  Usability issues concerns us very much.  No ammount of
> documentation can compensate for a flawed design.
> 
> I'm not saying that we should name everything "GMail", "GSpread_Sheet",
> "GInternet_Chatting_Program", etc.  In fact, I think that this would be
> about as bad.  It would make GNOME look silly and unprofessional. However,
> we should pick somewhat sensible names.  For instance, "Abiword" and
> "Sketch" are very informative names.
> 
> I can just imagine a new user struggling to figure out GNOME out.  He
> keeps looking around the main menu for some help.  If he only knew that
> all his answers lay behind the entry that says "Yelp"...
> 
> I know that it's too late to change the name "Evolution" or "Gnumeric",
> but can we still change the name "Yelp"?  What is wrong with "Help
> Browser".  Sure the name has been used.  Can't we update the app and keep
> the name?  I think we should.
> 
> Just my opinion of course.

Your concern is certainly valid, but this is also something the
Usability project (or more correctly the HIG group) has been working on.
See
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/hig-0.1/desktop-integration.html and the examples and recommendations mentioned.

I know Seth has been working on fixing a lot of the GNOME2 menu entries
according to these recommendations recently. As an example, the menu
entry (desktop file) for Yelp in CVS is now "Help" and the tooltip is
"Get help with GNOME". So I think things are not as bad as they might
look at first.

Thanks by the way to Seth and the HIG group for doing this work!


Christian