[Nautilus-list] Nautilus user testing at MIT

[Rebecca Schulman <rebecka eazel com>]

MIT is doing a bunch of user testing of Nautilus as part of their new
user environment, and I'm passing along some of it here. Worth noting 
is that current UNIX Users are confused by the way the desktop runs
right now, and
that the ability to edit text in the text view was noticed by users.

Rebecca


------------------------
Hi Rebecca,

No problem.  forward away.  We will be sending along more stuff as we
analyze results, but this particular confusion seems "universal."

I forwarded some other weird stuff to Beland earlier today.  We had a
couple of Nautilus crashes particularly when they tried to open the
Service
(?) menu looking for a way to save a document.

Here's the scenario.  We ask the testers to find a document, open it,
make
a change, and save it.

They find the document.  They open it, but they open it in the Nautilus
window and then make the change and then try to save, but since they
aren't
in an edit window, of course, they can't.  Eventually the dither around
and
find an editor.  Today, they found it in the left panel of the Nautilus
window (hadn't knoticed that before), but it isn't obvious.  The
Windows/Mac intuition is that if you double click on a text document, it
opens in an editor.

The other thing, and this isn't really nautilus, I think,but Gnome is
that
when you try to launch something there is no indication that it is
launching so we see people launching two, three, 16 instances of an
application.  They are looking for the hour glass or something.

Thanks for passing this along.  We'll send more as we get it.

Susan

At 6:57 PM -0800 1/2/01, Rebecca Schulman wrote:
>Susan:
> I'd like to share your testers' experience  with the nautilus team. Is it ok
>if I forward your mail to the nautilus list at Eazel?  We've had a lot of
>animated discussion about the desktop here, and I'm sure people would be
>interested in hearing how actual users fared with the solution we've
>implemented.
>If you'd rather write yourself, the address is nautilus-list lists eazel com
>
>Thanks,
>Rebecca
>
>
>"Susan B. Jones" wrote:
>
>> One of the things that we have seen rather consistently is that when
>> testers open Nautilus, they don't see what they expect.  What they expect
>> is that the Nautilus window will open.  Instead, the environment changes
>> and new icons appear on the desktop.
>>
>> If I am a Windows or Mac user, I guess I would expect that the desktop
>> would open on start up, then I would know to open the Home/My Computer
>> whatever it's called icon to get to the File Manager.  I guess, what we
>> have now is a kind of choice: do you want the Nautilus environment or the
>> Unix environment.  Isn't that kind of half-assed?  If we're heading for a
>> GUI environment, why not start with the GUI?  I'm not sure I'm saying this
>> right, but...
>>
>> Susan