Re: Panel UI - startmenu productivity thoughts



At 6:01 PM +0200 9/2/01, Sebastian Kapp wrote:
Adam Elman wrote:


One potential problem with this is that if the user gets into the habit of, say, double-clicking the Internet folder to launch Mozilla, but then launches another app in the folder one day, it might cause them to start up the wrong app the next time they go and do their usual habit.

So what usually happens is that you open the folder, stop moving the mouse pointer to first look which item is selected, click again if it is selected, go on moving otherwise. If the highlightning is not *really* obvious at the /very first moment/, you won't win nothing. Then, in the best case, your lookup time is the same time you needed otherwise to move the mouse pointer to the desired item (Assuming you know where to find your most used items). So you win nothing if the item is already selected and only loose if it's not.

You seem to assume here that the user actually notices things like highlighting. Research shows that when people create habits like this, they would _not_ notice such a thing. Consider this: if you drive the same route to work/school every day, would you notice if somebody renamed all the streets along the route without changing anything else about it?

I like the feature, though, if the highlightning is done right.

The problem is that to make any difference the highlighting would have to be so obvious that it would get in the way. Moreover, the slowdown from requiring the user to actually _think_ about what should really be an automatic habit would almost certainly outweigh the convenience of this feature.

From a different email:
So perhaps the OS/2 approach isn't too bad after all? If there was some easy way to set a default application (not GNOME choosing the last started one, but the user deciding which one (s)he needs most), it would be clear what application is started by double clicking the sub menu. Then it could become a habit without further implications. None that I'm aware of, at least.

It seems to me that if you're going to require the user to explicitly specify a "default action", it'd be easier and clearer just to give the user an easy way to add the most frequently-used apps to the main menu directly, for two reasons:

1) Rather than clicking on "Internet" to launch either an email client or a web browser or whatever, the user clicks on "Web Browser/Mozilla" or "Email/Evolution" or what have you explicitly, thus removing any ambiguity. 2) The user can do this for multiple apps in the same sub-folder. Specifying a default action for the "Internet" subfolder would be hard if, say, I used my email client and web browser about equally.

Adam
--




[Date Prev][Date Next]   [Thread Prev][Thread Next]   [Thread Index] [Date Index] [Author Index]