Re: Panel UI - startmenu productivity thoughts

[Adam Elman <aelman users sourceforge net>]

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
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