Re: [Usability]gnome-file-dialog UI update

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Tue, 2002-11-05 at 13:26, MM wrote:

> It has been a while, but I think the UI is in its final stages of
> development. New screenshots are available. 
> 
> http://home.wanadoo.nl/sbm/

Aha, thanks for the memory-jogger :)  A week or two ago I showed v0.6 of
these dialogs to some of the usability crowd here at Sun, including some
of the people involved in designing the equivalent dialogs for
Java/Swing.

Obviously some of these comments no longer apply as it looks like you've
already made the dialogs much simpler in v0.7, but I thought you'd like
to see them all anyway... names removed to protect the innocent :)

- My first reaction is that these dialogs are waaaaaay too complicated.
There are too many features exposed in these UIs. Of course, I do not
know who these developers believe their target end user is. If the
target is other geeks, these are fine. If they want these dialogs to
work for Win98/XP users, they will have to remove a lot of the
less-often-used features to make the utility of these dialogs clearer to
less-technically-saavy end users.

- I'd suggest they design the correct Save/Save As dialog box and then
move on to designing the correct Open dialog box. The point is that they
are not the same thing. Yes, as engineers, I'm sure they are trying to
use a lot of code/UI in both places but, in the end user's eyes, these
two dialog boxes are used for very different tasks. As a concrete
example, I do not believe there should be "create new directory"
functionality in the Open dialog box.

- Leave 'search' functionality to the file manager, and just make it
possible to drag a file or directory into the file selection dialogs to
switch to that directory.

- "Show Navigation" button is ugly and inconsistent, we don't have
buttons like this anywhere else in GNOME. If people really believe a
navigation bar is useful in a file selection dialog (and I'm not
convinced), it should either be there all the time, or at the very least
hidden behind a proper disclosure widget.

- Navigation model is notably different from Nautilus.  If we're going
to be consistent, either Nautilus needs a sidebar view more like the one
in these dialogs, or this dialog needs a sidebar view more like the
Nautilus tree view.  Either that or they both need a proper Mac-like
tree view :) 

- Why do some locations (Home, Desktop, Documents) appear to be
hard-coded in both the Location dropdown and the Folder list?  One place
or the other is fine, otherwise you're just wasting space that could be
used for something else (or nothing!)

- One of the interesting features about the Swing file chooser is that
it's not inherently a dialog. There is a file chooser panel ( which has
a bunch of features). Then, as convenience API, there a special
FileChooser Dialog where the file chooser panel gets placed inside a
modal dialog box. This is very useful for placing the file chooser in
useful but unusual places. It's also useful for letting people build
complicated, custom file choosers.

- One important feature is that file choosers should be able to be
stateful. That is, they should remember where they last opened something
so that, when relaunched, they remember where they were.

- A misconception some engineers have is that Open file choosers look
like Save choosers look like Save As choosers. This (I belive) is mostly
based on the fact that these choosers tend to have similar looking
plumbing. It's useful to realise that these three (or more) types of
choosers might look different.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems