[Usability]Re: GNOME 2.0 feedback

[<bordoley msu edu>]

I got sometime to comment on these so why not :)

Calum Benson <calum benson sun com> said:

> "Nautilus isn't a terribly good file manager. It's slow and hard to
> use. It doesn't offer a tree view. Its visible appearance is dull, and
> it's not especially quick. It doesn't have any real shortcuts or
> accelerators. While it does have a couple of nifty features that look
> good in demos, I think I'm going to have a hard time selling this to
> our users, who are used to the (superior based on what I've seen so
> far) CDE file manager.


By doesn't have a tree view, is the sun tester refering to a macos style list 
view. I would love to see this in nautilus, and it also has some nice 
usability pluses for drag and drop.

> "If it hasn't got a viewer application, it should ask you what you want
> to use (just like windows does).

This is a really good point. Someone should file a bug on this :)

> 
> "Even when I get to the configuration by right-clicking on an icon, it's
> an incomprehensible dialog box. But once you've configured an
> application you still get the 'no application/viewer for filename.xls'
> dialog box when you right-click.
> 
> "The whole mime-type registry thing needs a good going over.
> 

The way we handle mime types in general is pretty confusing. I find it pretty 
annoying that in order to open a file that I know is text, but nautilus 
doesn't I have to explicitly launched gedit from the menus and then use the 
file selector instead of just opening it from within nautilus. Kind of going 
back to the previous comment I like how in windows It lets you explicitly 
pick an app from a list of all known apps to open a file.

> "In nautilus, how do you adjust the size of the text and icon for a file
> independently? (So you get small icons but readable text.)

Well the answer is to change the default icon settings. Maybe text size 
shouldn't scale with icon zoom. I can definately see the confusion the 
current ui causes. One note, I would like to see nautilus draw text on the 
right for small icons (50% or 25%) like mac os does (very similar to the 
simple list view in explorer too).

> 
> "Tooltips in the menus are below the cursor, so obscure the menu item
> below. Especially irritating as the menu drops from the top of the
> screen.

Perhaps tooltips are not really all the necessary in the applications menu 
now that we are using terms like "text editor" for our app names.

> 
> "The main application menu has changed from the bottom to the top
> panel. This might please some Mac addicts, but is a poor choice for
> everyone else. (The default should surely be to work like the Windows,
> KDE, and old gnome - the start button is bottom left. And then have an
> option to do it the other way.

This is an issue of learnability. There are clear usability pluses to our 
menu setup and I would be quite upset if we even considered changing it. I'm 
sort of sad that redhat has chosen too ignore this usability plus in their 
version of gnome2 (based on screenshots i've seen correct me if i'm wrong on 
this one).

> 
> "Dialogs have help and close buttons. This is daft. What happened to
> cancel and OK? (If I hit close, does it apply the changes I've made or
> not? What if I shut a window from the window manager? In fact, I tried
> this and the behaviour is downright dangerous - closing via the window
> manager applies the changes, which isn't at all what I would expect.)

Auspex had made a point about this during the whole debate over close buttons 
on instant apply dialogs. I won't restart the discussion but perhaps he had a 
point. 

> 
> "Eye of Gnome has close on the toolbar, which is odd. I would have liked
> to see "save as..." there instead, if it did image format
> conversion. (And it's really pointless if it doesn't, as ImageMagick
> and a host of other tools are much better image display tools.)
> 

I'm pretty sure that the close button on the toolbar is a bug. gedit has this 
as well which is probably there because it uses an mdi interface, but i still 
consider it a bug.


> 
> "How to edit terminal preferences? You can't, because it refers to them
> as "profiles" which will simply confuse users.
>

This is a good point. Personally I find the whole profiles thing confusing, 
but I am not a terminal power user either. I guess I don't see the benefit of 
being able to have multiple setups for the terminal, but I imagine they exist 
for a reason.