Re: Capplet organization

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Tue, 2007-03-13 at 21:37 +0100, Jens Granseuer wrote:

> It would be interesting and helpful to know what the reasons
> were back then to move away from organizing everything in such
> an integrated control panel, and using individual capplets. I
> suspect part of it was the large number of pages, but I'm not
> sure if having a multitude of separate capplets is better.

One of the things we saw in the Sun usability study of GNOME 1.4 was
that users felt overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in the all-in-one
control panel, even if they were only adjusting things in one particular
capplet.

Part of that was certainly down to poorer design and categorisation of
individual capplets in those days as well, though, resulting in (for
example) the user having to seek out and visit more than one capplet
just to change all the fonts on the desktop.[1]

Whether those same users would find it any easier to locate a particular
capplet on the long menu we have now is hard to say.  Novell's recent
study, at least, has determined the menu to be sub-optimal for certain
tasks.

On the other hand, I've argued before that the flat alphabetical list we
have now is probably easier to visually scan than a categorised list or
view-- *if* you already know what you're looking for, which is often the
case for a user who already has some experience with the desktop.
Unfortunately, many usability studies tend to avoid the 'acquired
knowledge' factor, because it's more expensive and time-consuming to run
studies that revisit user behaviour over time.  Thus they usually just
study the "new user exploring for the first time" scenario, which is
certainly important, but doesn't necessarily help to validate that the
UI will adapt to their needs as they become more skillful and demanding
users.

Cheeri,
Calum.

[1]
<http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/customization_tasks.html> touches on some of this.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems