Re: GNOME usability test report now available

[thristian atdot org]

On Fri, Jul 20, 2001 at 04:12:50PM +0100, Calum Benson wrote:
> The full report from Sun's first GNOME usability study is now available
> online:
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/report_main.html

This is depressing for oh-so-many reasons: the stinkiness of the GNOME
UI, the tragic unenriched lives of users who have no idea what to do
with a shell prompt. :P

My most nitpicking annoyance is that the "doctored" screenshots (you
know, "this is how our UI suggestions should look") were done on a Mac
or PC. The default GNOME UI font is -adobe-helvetica-*, not Arial, and
the resultant spacing is all wrong. But then, I'm a grump, so ignore
me. :)

In file_management.html, you (or the report author) suggest that
"matches glob" and "matches regexp" should be replaced withb "matches
global expression" and matches "regular expression". Is that such a
good idea?

	- A "glob" is not a "global expression". 
	
	- Is "regular expression" that much more useful than "regexp"?

A glob is a shell-style match (* means any characters, ? means one
character, {alternatives,choices,options} presented like this).
"globbing" is so called because it is (on Linux) a wrapper for the
system call glob(3). glob(7) puts it like this:

	Long  ago,  in Unix V6, there was a program /etc/glob that
	would expand  wildcard  patterns.   Soon  afterwards this
	became a shell built-in.  These  days  there  is also a
	library routine glob(3) that will perform this function for a
	user program.


The only advantage I can see to "regular expression" is that it's
composed of actual English words - it's not easier to understand. In
fact, it's more misleading because people will assume that because
they know the word "regular" and "expression" from vernacular usage,
they can figure out what a "regular expression" is. The fact is it's
the Computer Science definitions of those words that matter, and like
most technical usages they differ quite highly from the "dictionary"
definitions.

I say, stick with "regexp" because the people who know what a regexp
is will recognise it, and the people who don't know will know that
they don't know, you know? :)


Later on, there's stress over Nautilus' "Open With..." buttons. I have
no problems believing that the average man on the street or PC user
would look goggle-eyed at a button labelled "Open with XEmacs" or
"Open with vi". Unfortunately, that's the name of the program, that's
what they're called. As for gedit, I suspect the problem is one of
branding. If the first item on the list had been "Open with Edit",
and the resulting window's titlebar would be "GNOME Edit - foo.txt",
this whole awful mess might never have happened. Or maybe it would, I
don't know..


customization_tasks.html:

Why do you think menu titles are a good thing? Surely the simplest
method is to do away with them entirely?

Contextual menus: why does it take these people so long to remember
contextual menus? Right-mouse menus are pretty consistently used
throughout GNOME - why should this not be Just Another Fact Of Life
like "single click to select, double-clock to activate"?

That said, some kind of window-controls-on-mouse-over would be pretty
Nifty, as then the applet could trap all the buttons for itself - this
would make the dock-port of wmquake that much more usable. :)

The report says: "'Wallpaper' and 'Color' are mutually exclusive, yet
they are not presented in a distinct way". "Wallpaper" and "Colour"
are *not* mutually exclusive. If you pick a small wallpaper image and
have it "centred" rather than "tiled" or "stretched", the colour will
show around the edges.

I agree that the relationship could be made more distinct - I suggest
having "Colour" at the top of the dialog, with the Wallpaper controls
below that in a groupbox where the "Wallpaper" label has been replaced
by a check box labelled "Add wallpaper".

Err.. damn. You can replace the heading-labels of a list control with
arbitary widgets in GTK, but you can't replace the heading-labels of a
groupbox (what GTK calls a "frame"). :(


logging_out.html:

You let them bring up the dialog and told them never to touch "Halt",
apparently you didn't tell them what "Halt" actually did. Left to
their own imaginations, they naturally concluded it would be Something
Bad.

Your suggestion is "Suspend (Halt - stops processor)". What it
actually does is shutdown the machine, which is really none of those
things. OK, it *does* stop the processor, but it stops everything else
too. 

Equivalent functionality is in GDM in menus. Regular users probably
shouldn't be shutting down machines anyway, so perhaps those options
should be removed from the logout menu entirely.


Finally, this must be the official all-time classic New Unix User's
quote: 

	"Oh God no, [this is] a bunch of stuff I probably don't want
	to know."

Thanks, P9, you're my hero. :)

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