Re: [HIG] Feedback from HCI review

[Seth Nickell <snickell stanford edu>]

> 1. Better support for Internet browsing and media components
> 2. Configuration difficulties (will expand)
> 
> Firstly, most students find that the functionality of common browsers found
> under LInux are a poor substitute to IE. Although I'm not of the same opinion
> many find that the support of mneumoniccs is minimal and font specification
> and display is rather poor.

Hm, not sure where this complaint comes from. Both Galeon and Mozilla
use keyboard shortcuts to a reasonable degree (I'm assuming you mean
mneumonics as in "keyboard shortcuts" ?), and both allow specification
of fonts. They do not render anti-aliased due to now-rectified problems
in the way X font rendering happened. In the not to distant future we
should have anti-aliasing capable versions of Galeon & Mozilla. One
problem could be that many distributions do not include nice fonts.

> Rendering of streaming media is extremely difficult and many of the applicationsavailable under Linux are by far inferior to those available to MS users.

This is one of my three main usability objectives for GNOME 2.2.
Gstreamer should provide the technical underpinnings needed to nail this
important feature. I'm working on making sure the interfaces for these
are usable, which mainly means they just work rather than needing to
tweak a bunch of settings and system configuration.

> Second, there seems to be some inconsistencies in the adding of applets to the
> tool panel. You can remove an object that is presented (not problems there) but
> the presence of remove automatically suggests the ability to add. Trying to
> perform this action by following the subsequent menu structure is extremely
> difficult. I think that if you present the user with the option Remove you
> should account for the presupposed option of Add

I'm not sure I understand what you are describing here, could you
restate it? 

Where do we "remove automatically"? We do have the ability to add, and I
agree that the method is very obscure and difficult to use. I have a
sketchy interface design for a panel designer that should alleviate this
problem, that perhaps we will get for 2.2 or 2.4.

Thanks for this data, I look forward to more feedback.

cheers,

-Seth