Re: [Usability]one-persion usability study

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Wed, 2002-07-03 at 12:54, Sunnanvind Fenderson wrote:

> Here's how I would like it to work by default: pressing alt does
> nothing (so people can use things like "alt-f"), but releasing alt
> (*if no other key was pressed*) activates the menubar and makes the
> mnemonics visible. Now, with the menubar active, the user should be
> able to navigate the menu with arrow keys or with mnemonics.

This is basically what F10 does right now (except for the showing/hiding
mnemonics thing).  I believe there's a bug open to have Alt do the same
thing.

> The gnome-terminal version 1.9.6  I tried was like this:
> 
>  1) The mnemonics were useless when I were navigating the menus with
>     the arrows (from F10 or from clicking once on a menu) if the mouse
>     hadn't hovered over at least one menu option.

I'm seeing this too.  I think there's a bug open for this too, against
gtk menus.

>  2) The mnemonics were always visible, even when they weren't
>     active. This makes the menus harder to read.

True, up to a point.  I think we've kind of discussed before about
whether they should only appear when you press Alt, but so far nobody's
really felt strongly enough about it to make it happen.  (I know Windoze
XP offers this as an option, but I still keep the mnemonics switched on
all the time because I want to know exactly what to press before I press
anything!  Would be interesting to know how many people feel the same.)

>  3) When I pressed alt-f, both the mnemonics and the arrow keys worked
>     (good) but I couldn't go right or left to other menus.

Sounds like a bug, works for me though.

>  4) Toggling the "disabling mnemonics" option also toggles the sorta
>     unrelated option right beneath it. "Neat" I thought at first, but
>     it soon became annoying.

Which option is this?  I don't see it anywhere.

> Something different - this is an old, often nagged about item - I like
> to have the menubar at the top of the screen, even for the apps, like
> that old PARC wimp gui, and like Mac OS. It could be argued about
> whether this should be the default or not, but since we're already
> *having* some kind of menubar at the top of the screen, I think we
> might as well go full mac OS style.

One of the main objections to this has traditionally been that it
doesn't work very well for users who prefer to use focus-follows-mouse.
Various timing hacks have been tried to get around this, but I guess
none of them have been well-enough received to make it into the GNOME
mainstream.  (It's also really unpleasant if you're running across more
than one display, unless you replicate the menu structure on each one.)

> More crackrockitude: I notice that there are many programs with tabs,
> like gnome-terminal and galeon. Shouldn't this be built into the
> window manager instead? Like with fluxbox or pwm. I mean, if it's such
> a big need that every one wants it...

We've talked about that before as well :) At one point it seemed like we
were trying to get rid of MDI from the desktop altogether, as it has a
number of usability problems, so the discussions kind of petered out. 
It just won't die, though, so maybe we need to talk about it again.

> Here's a little UI-snafu I found: I created a panel and put three
> launchers on it, and I removed those hideous hide-buttons - now I
> couldn't right click on the panel to add more launchers

There's already a bug open about this, but we haven't agreed on the best
solution so far.  In the meantime,  you can press Ctrl+F10 when anything
on the panel has focus, to pop up the panel's right-click menu.

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