[gnome-love] Re: [Nautilus-list] GNOME user environment brainstorming

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

eem12 cornell edu wrote:

> IMO, the complexity of the Panel should be controlled by user levels as
> well.  Will novice user understand the idea of multiple desktops? Will
> they ever even have enough windows open to need it?

Well, I'm not a huge fan of user levels anyway, myself, but I don't
think this is a user level issue particularly-- if people don't
understand multiple desktops, they shouldn't switch them on  :o)  Or
more importantly, if they do switch them on whilst exploring and don't
understand them, we need to make sure it's easy to switch them right
back off again.  (But this sort of 'advanced' feature shouldn't be
switched on by default for anyone, IMHO...)

> Along the same lines, in Beginner mode the Foot icon should probably have
> a tooltip or some other means of drawing attention to it 

Again, it should have a tooltip anyway, beginner mode or not.  All icons
should have an alternative textual description anyway (especially now
that the ATK is here), and a tooltip is as good a place as any to put
it.

> IIRC the original Win95 Explorer had an animated arrow that highlighted the 
> Start Button.

Now, to me that was always a classic example of having to add a whole
new feature to explain another one, whereas if they'd designed the
original one properly they wouldn't have had to  :o)

> If so, there should be an easy way to hide/show all open windows, a la
> MacOS and KDE.

Yep, that would be nice.

> A Good Idea(tm) might be organizing by action rather than by application:
>
>         Create a ...
>                 Spreadsheet
>                 Diagram
>                 Letter
>                 Graphic

Ah, the old application-centric v. document-centric argument  :o)  Yes,
document-centric has distinct advantages, but it often falls down in
practice-- e.g. what if I use a different program for creating JPEGs
than I do for GIFs?  You can soon end up with so many special cases that
it can become unusable... not to mention the between-apps rivalry that
goes on so that you end up with things like "Create an AbiWord
document", "Create an Open Office document" and "Create a GEdit
document" all on the same menu, which virtually turns it back into an
app-centric model again anyway  :o)

> IMO, "Start" or "Launch" is a more accurate (and action-oriented :)
> adjective than "Run."

"Launch" is maybe a bit geeky and unlikely to be understood by non-savvy
users, I would think... "Start" maybe isn't too bad, though, despite its
M$ overones ;o)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems