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

[Calum Benson <calum benson ireland sun com>]

Sander Vesik wrote:

> I really disagree here - just because standard gnome installation is
> horribly unuasble when it comes to multiple desktops or in fact not
> showing the user any clue these were supported at all.

You're right there-- hiding a feature completely is just as bad as
confusing people by pushing functionality in their faces that they'll
never use.  One of the skills of user itnerface design is to find the
correct balance, to make advanced features discoverable (relative to how
"advanced" they really are), but not so intrusive that they get in the
way if you don't want to know about them.

> No, desk guide should come up by default unless user specificly turned it of. 

Perhaps it should come up by default-- its visibility on the panel
certainly gives it some of that important "discoverability", and its
presence is fairly harmless.  Unfortunately, there's currently no way
for uninitiated users to discover how to do anything very useful with
it.  None of the "obvious" interactions with the deskguide-- clicking or
right-clicking-- let you add or remove desktops, for example.  And if
you only had one desktop set up, as a new user would, you wouldn't
discover the desktop-switching functionality.  But I guess that's a
whole other issue  :)

Anwyay, I digress... the point I was trying to make in my original post
is that CDE, for example, is configured with four desktops by default,
as the result of which I've seen users unfamiliar with virtual desktops
switch to an empty one by mistake and never recover without outside
assistance!  That's the sort of complexity I'd advocate against enabling
by default.

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