Usability Suggestion

[Sydney Weidman <Sydney_Weidman mbnet mb ca>]

I recently upgraded my parents' (both in their 60's) computers from
Win95 to GNU/Linux running Gnome. My mother, who has used a computer for
many years, was very impressed and could do everything she wanted to do
(except import her address book entries from her old SideKick files).
Her epson color printer works flawlessly and connecting to the internet
was a snap.

My father, has never used a computer before, so I was sure he would be
an easy convert to the Gnome world. I was right. He finds everything
quite intuitive and most of the applications are well behaved. Both my
folks are having a blast and proving that the
"not-ready-for-the-desktop" argument is just a bunch of Redmond FUD.

One major annoyance has cropped up, however. There are never any "wait"
messages of any kind while background processing is taking place. This
is extremely disconcerting especially for a new user like my Dad, who
assumes that computers will be instataneous. He just thinks the computer
has frozen. For instance, I was trying to show him that you could
display ftp sites on the internet in the Gnome Midnight Commander just
as if they were on your own computer. After I entered the URL in the
location edit box, the window (the whole desktop, actually) just stopped
responding for about two minutes. No status messages appear during this
time. Also, there is also no option presented to the user to cancel the
action, something that I thought was one of the Ten Commandments of User
Interface Design.

I would recommend that a status message or dialog box be presented to
the user during any operation which is expected to take more that 1
second. Where ever possible, the user should be able to cancel a lengthy
operation mid-stream in some semi-graceful fashion by using the GUI
(i.e. not just open a terminal, killall misbehaving_app_name or
whatever).

I would also recommend that installing Gnome and demonstrating it for
schoolchildren and senior citizens would be the best UI research
methodology possible.

Thanks for listening.

Cheers!

Syd.