"Add drive" designs

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

Hi all,

I've been taking another look at the "add drive" designs for Nautilus,
which will hopefully be worked on as a GSoC project this summer. There
are a few elements to the design, and there are some open questions
about it (both design and technical), so I wanted to lay it all out in
writing.

There are a couple of goals for the design:

 1. Retire the existing "Browse Network" part of Nautilus - it's
clunky, seems rather old fashioned, and overlaps with "Connect to
Server".

 2. Stop showing all internal volumes in the sidebar - they're not
relevant a lot of the time, and clutter the sidebar.

The design aims to address these goals by:

 * Merging "Browse Network" into the "Connect to Server" dialog. Where
you currently see a list of recent servers, there would also be a list
of servers that have been discovered on the network.

 * Instead of showing all internal volumes in the sidebar, hide them
by default but add controls to allow the user to configure which ones
are displayed.

A further step could involve merging Connect to Server with drive
configuration, into a generic "Add Drive" dialog (which could be
called something else, such as "Add Drives and Servers") [1].

As far as I'm concerned, there are a number of open questions which
could influence the final design. These are:

 1. Is it possible to discover servers on the network, in order to
present them in a list? Are there scenarios where this wouldn't work
for UX reasons (say, in environments where there are a lot of
servers)?

 2. Should we include online account configuration? This could be a
good place to advertise that you can add OwnCloud to the sidebar (and
hopefully Google Drive in the future).

 3. Related to the previous question - what is the best way to
describe "Connect to Server"? Common terminology is evolving in this
area - are these servers, "cloud drives", "online accounts", or
something else?

 4. Depending on question 2 and 3 - does it make sense to merge
Connect to Server and a dialog for adding internal drives? To some
people, "servers" and "disks" might not logically go together. Also,
disk configuration might work better as a preferences dialog, rather
than an action dialog.

The mockup experiments might help to clarify the significance of some
of these questions [1].

Finally, if we do make these changes, we should think about how to
help users adjust to the new design - we shouldn't just hide internal
drives, or retire Browse Network, without providing some guidance. We
should design some kind of information bubble or dialog that explains
the changes to users. I consider this guidance to be an essential part
of the design task.

Allan

[1] 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/master/nautilus/nautilus-next/add-drive-experiments.png