Re: Killing Views Part 2 - The return of the Usabilty study

[Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>]

On Mon, 2003-06-02 at 21:01, Mark Finlay wrote:


> We instead of suggesting solutions, I think I'll look at the problem for
> a second. What about internal viewers causes problems and confusion:

Well, I'll put forward some solutions. :) See what you think.

> * When you use an internal viewer your file view is replaced. This means
> that you have to go back to the file view to get to another file. Very
> unforgiving/iritating if you want to keep that file open and keep
> browsing files. To me this fits into the "unexpected behavior" catagory.
> People are much more at home with different things being shown in
> different apps. Would possibly be less iritating if files were opened in
> a new window by default.

When you view a file in a Nautilus window, the side-pane gives a list of
options for opening the file in another application. May I suggest that,
when you click one of these buttons, the user interface backtracks one
step? Would this solve the problem, allowing the user a quick preview
before editing a file? I'm only defending the file-previewer abilities
of nautilus because I use it.

There is a problem with this solution in in that not everyone (eg. me)
don't display the side-pane by default, so this wouldn't help me. But it
might help others. And it may also make sense if Nautilus is supposed to
work as a "file previewer" as well as directory browser.

> * It is not immediately obvious that files are read only and that to
> edit them they need to be opened in an editor. Especailly the case with
> text files. I see very little benefit to using the text view instead of
> gedit. As for images and pdf, I think a universal previewer is better...

Don't agree with this myself. If a file opens in Nautilus, it's fairly
clear that it's a file preview.

> * To do internal viewers properly you need to change the menus and
> toolbar of nautilus for each viewer. UI changing within the same window
> is really confusing to the user and makes it really hard learn to use
> the app. 2 sepporate apps with 2 unique uis is a lot easier to learn
> than a single ui with a ui that changes.

I agree here. The menu options available when previewing a file in
Nautilus should be severely limited. If all can be placed in a single
menu (avoiding the modification of the Nautilus menu too much) this
would work well. If modifying the menu can be completely avoided, this
route should be taken. I find the GGV preview quite good as it only adds
things to the toolbar, and then it only adds to the right (never inserts
into the middle).

GGV does, however, add a sidebar which is further from the document than
the Nautilus sidebar. Why is this?

Regards.

-- 
Peter Harvey <pah06 uow edu au>
SITACS, University of Wollongong