Re: [Nautilus-list] Constructive Criticism Revisted

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

James Mitchell Allmond wrote:

> Menubar:                Get rid of "Go"

Hmm... "Go" is one of the 'standard' menus we recommend in the GNOME UI
Guidelines for apps that allow the user to navigate around some content,
be it a file hierarchy or a text document, so if we lost it here we'd
want to lose it from every other such app, like Galeon.  I'm all in
favour of getting rid of things that aren't useful in a GUI, but I'd
probably need more convincing about this one.

> Left Toolbar:           Get rid of "Home" and get rid of "Web Search"

"Home" is another one of these things I suspect users often just expect
to see in an app like this-- I don't use it personally, and I'd be happy
to see it go if user testing suggested that nobody else did either.  But
I think we'd probably discover that enough people still wanted it to
warrant keeping it.

> Right Toolbar (Places): Add icons/links to the places people think
> about. Most non computer experts think in terms of physical objects.
> Therefore, they want to see their cdrom, their floppy, their zip disk,
> their home(not a hard disk because very few people have seen a hard
> disk. They just think some magical device inside holds their info.)
> Also, it makes navigation much more intuitive and fluid. It also makes
> things easier for dragging files to floppies and zip disks. It could
> also be used to drag files to a cdr-rw. The other things I've added are
> the local network(smb) and the start here icon (they should be able to
> access the ximian setup tools, control panel, etc.... from here).

I agree with the general concept.  A couple of initial comments would
be:

- I had no idea what most of the icons (except floppy, CD, and Home)
represented. They probably ought to have text labels like regular
toolbar buttons (togglable by the same mechanism as other toolbar button
labels).

- People don't (currently) expect to be able drag things onto toolbar
buttons (or any other sort of buttons), so it's unlikely they would
discover anything other than the basic button-like navigation
functionality of your new icons without being told about it.  Perhaps
some other visual representation would make this more obvious.  

For example (off the top of my head, but I think somebody may have
suggested this before) have the main Nautilus view split into two panes,
a big one containing the main view as now, and a small one containing
your "Places" icons, but drawn just like regular Nautilus file view
icons.  People expect to be able to double click Nautilus file view
icons to open them, and to be able to drag things onto them to move/copy
them there, so this would be a more "discoverable" way of doing it
IMHO.  You could also then easily add new locations to your Places list
just by dragging a directory/device icon from the main view into the
Places view, and delete them the way you would any other file in
Nautilus.

- Anything you can do with drag and drop needs to be accessible by other
means too, for people who can't use a mouse.  So some sort of "copy
to/move to [Place]" menu would be needed somewhere, perhaps on the Edit
menu.

> Right menubar (action): This was something I just added cause it could
> have potential.

This is much like the idea we talked about a few months back (I forget
on which mailing list), albeit in reverse, where every window would have
an icon representing its contents.  You could then drag that icon into
other windows to perform actions on that document, e.g. drag it onto a
printer icon to print it, into an email composition window to attach it,
onto the desktop to create a shortcut to it etc.  This is something
Sun's old OpenWindows desktop used to have, although it wasn't
implemented very consistently so what was an excellent idea kind of died
a death when CDE came on the scene.  

The advantage of doing it the Sun way around, rather than the way you've
shown here, is that you don't need an icon in every window for every
action you can perform on that window.  You only need one icon per
window, and the range of possible actions is limited only by how the
other windows and icons on your desktop interpret a document being
dropped onto it.

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