Re: [Usability]Galeon 2 usability

[Christian Rose <menthos menthos com>]

Hi Alastair,

both your comments are topics that have already been extensively
discussed in the past on this list. Anyway, I'll try to summarize some
of the most important points from those discussions.


sön 2002-10-13 klockan 20.26 skrev Alastair Scott:
> >         - menu layout: Many old galeon users like the old menu layout of
> >         galeon 1 more than the new layout of galeon 2, which is more
> >         simple and tries to follow the HIG. Many options are missing in
> >         the new menu.
> 
> Both should be offered because, if you cut things out without an opportunity
> for users to put them back, there'll be a microcosm of the "Gnome 2 is
> dumbed-down Gnome 1.4" battle.

That's not a very good argument. There will always be people complaining
loudly when there's a change that don't suit them or their behavior.
Using this as an excuse for not changing anything is always a dead end.
It leaves no room for any redesigns at all, however necessary they may
be for other good reasons.


> >         - preferences: there are many missing preferences in galeon 1
> >         when compared with galeon 2. This annoys many users. It has been
> >         suggested to provide two different "Preferences" dialog, one
> >         simple default and another for "Advanced" users.
> 
> For the same reason as above, both should be offered.  What you could have
> is, somewhere in the preferences, a page with:
> 
> Menus
> 
> [x] Galeon 1.x layout
> 
> [x] Simplified layout

That sounds icky, both in terms of menu layout and preferences. If
you're not familiar with the browser you're using or what version (if
you for example just use the default in the desktop environment), how
would you know what "Galeon 1.x layout" or "All Galeon 1.x preferences"
means?

Also, this is not much different from the concept of user levels, which
has proven to be very bad in practice -- many users (falsely) associate
"simple" with "stupid" and "advanced" with "all features/goodies", so in
practice they always turn on the advanced mode to get "all features",
even if they're lost in all preferences and configurability as soon as
they do that. Many will never want to admit that they are using the
"stupid" interface, so they will go with the advanced one, even if they
get lost in it. And so on. Asking people to classify themselves
according to a "simple" and "advanced" scheme (or even more user levels)
does rarely work in practice, because it's a difficult question to ask a
user. It's a lot of things that aren't clear at all. What do these modes
control? Can I change it later? Will features be missing? What will be
missing?

Also, when users go searching for a particular preference or to modify a
particular behavior and you don't find it, it's not always easy to
connect it mentally to the "mode" you are in. This happened to me on
several occasions -- I used to run Nautilus in Expert mode, and I had a
lot of trouble helping other users to configure their copy of Nautilus,
because I couldn't find the preferences I were looking for. They of
course were running in a different user level, which I only found out
much later.


Christian