Some usability comments

[Malcolm Tredinnick <malcolm commsecure com au>]

Jamie Zawinkski was in the #gnome IRC channel today (early Monday
morning, UTC, adjust for your local timezone) and had some comments on
how users worked with the kiosk machines he had set up at the DNA Lounge
(http://www.dnalounge.com/). With his permission, I've summarised the
comments below, in the hope that some people will find them useful.

"Executive Summary":
	The basic Gnome setup (standard Ximian install via Red Carpet,
	using Sawfish as the window manager) is difficult for newcomers
	to find their way around.

Setup:
	Those who are interested in the technical setup of the machines,
	can look at http://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/src/kiosk/. But
	they are not really relevant to the following comments.

	The important thing to know is that the session has two panels
	running. The panel at the bottom contains a url-entry box for
	the Web Control applet and a tasklist applet. The panel on the
	right-hand side of the screen contains a bunch of application
	launch icons for Netscape, irc client and so forth.

	The kiosk machines have a keyboard with a trackball and three
	buttons centered above the keys, as in the following diagram:

                        ------------
                       |            |
                       | 1  ball  3 |
                       |     2      |
                        ------------

         -----------------------------------------
        |                                         |
        |                   kbd                   |
        |                                         |
         -----------------------------------------


	One of the design goals in setting these machines up was to use
	very standard components. Jamie says he went with whatever Red
	Carpet would download by default on the grounds that that means
	he is running the same code as a large group of other users, so
	bugs will be found and ironed out with a minimal effort on his
	part. The exact quote was: "well, see, one of my constraints
	here is that I have *no time*".

Jamie's Observations:
	[I have left the comments people had on these items to the next
	section.]

	(1) Most users struggled to know which mouse button to use to
	perform actions. They almost all tried to use the right-hand
	button to launch things. Even if they worked out the left button
	worked for something, they would go back to using to right
	button the next time. This resulted in lots of random menus
	hanging around the screen as a result of the right button
	clicking.

	(2) Lack of feedback when an application was launching was a
	problem, too. People would click on an icon, apparently nothing
	would happen, so they would click again, and again. And soon six
	copies of the application would be running.

	(3) Because icons in the panel don't have text displaying all
	the time, users would not know what an icon's purpose was.
	Apparently, it is not obvious that holding the mouse over an
	icon will bring up a tooltip after a second or so. Maybe the
	icons should contain a static text description.

	(4) Users will not navigate menus in a situation like this. If
	something is not on the panel, it won't get used.

Suggestions from others:
	(A) Jamie wondered about mapping both trackball buttons to send
	button 1 events to remove the problems with users clicking the
	wrong button. Nobody came up with anything that would be
	impossible under this scenario. Everything can be done in other
	ways (using menu items). Some window manager functions will not
	be as easy, but the average kiosk user won't use them.

	(B) It was suggested to use Window Maker, instead of Sawfish, as
	the window manager. Then launch applications using Window
	Maker's launch icons (I'm using the wrong word here, but I
	don't know the right term), rather than the panel. The advantage
	of this is that each launch icon will only launch a single
	instance and clicking it again will bring the already running
	instance to the top. The negative side of this proposal is that
	it runs contrary to Jamie's design decision of using standard
	stuff like everybody else. He is concerned that Window Maker is
	not as widely used and won't integrate as easily.

	(C) A number of people suggested the possibility of writing
	"launcher" things for the panel that would perform the same
	function as the Window Maker equivalent: launch an application
	only once. This doesn't stop people manually creating dozens of
	gnome-terminals, for example, but they won't do it by accident.
	Currently this option doesn't exist, though, so it's not a
	"right now" solution.

	(D) The drawback of putting some descriptive text in icons is
	that it would have to be true text, rather than part of the
	graphic. Otherwise it won't be translated into other languages.
	A possibility here is to install a special set of icons just for
	kiosk-type use, but again it's a solution that isn't here today.

	(E) It was pointed out that xalf provides application launching
	feedback.  However, the normal xalf symbol is tucked away in the
	corner of the foobar and is not easily noticed. Opinions seem
	divided on whether other configuration options for xalf would do
	the trick or not. A few people felt that nothing short of being
	able to stop people doing multiple launches would be sufficient.

Cheers,
Malcolm

-- 
Remember that you are unique. Just like everyone else.