Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus user testing at MIT

[Steven Hatfield <ashari knightswood net>]

On Thursday 04 January 2001 11:43 am, you wrote:
> on 1/3/01 3:26 AM, Rebecca Schulman at rebecka eazel com wrote:
> > 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
>
> This kind of thing is always very interesting. A few comments interspersed
> below.
>
> > ------------------------
> > 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.
>
> Part of the problem here was that the old text viewer let you change the
> text but had no way to save changes. This was an obvious flaw in the text
> viewer. The new text viewer does not have this flaw, so this problem should
> be greatly reduced.
>
> Of course, some people will still expect to be able to make changes in the
> text viewers, and be surprised/frustrated when they can't. But at least the
> UI won't mislead them into thinking that they can.
>
> >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.
>
> I can't help but gripe about this misuse of the word "intuition". It's true
> that Nautilus does not behave exactly like Windows or Mac in that by
> default you view documents in Nautilus and have to take a different step to
> open them in external applications. But this has nothing to do with
> "intuition", unless you cheapen "intuition" to mean simply "expectation
> based on using somewhat similar programs in the past". If you follow that
> route, then you start calling everything new "non-intuitive" because it's
> not exactly like its predecessors.
>
> > 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.

I (as a former Win32 user/developer and a recently converted Linux user) have 
to agree with Susan here -- without visual feedback, using Gnome/Nautilus is 
annoying. KDE2 gives me visual feedback in that the task bar shows an entry 
for the application that is starting with a spinning disc next to it, and 
then once the application is fully realized, the spinning disc turns into the 
application icon. This is a great first step (for KDE2 users, at least), but 
one thing that Linux (ALL window managers/desktop environments) is missing is 
that hourglass pointer. Why is it that we can't change the way our pointer 
looks? We can change every pixel on the screen, except for the one that our 
eyes follow all day?! If you could find a way to change this arrow (and 
provide the visual feedback that is necessary for users to know that 
something is happening), you would go a long way toward strengthening Linux 
in the eyes of the user base.

>
> I agree that this is one of GTK/Gnome/Linux/Unix's big problems with poor
> feedback. I hope we can find some way to address it in the future.

At least someone agrees with me :-)

Have a great day, and Happy New Year!
-Steven Hatfield

>
> > 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
> >
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