[Usability]Preferred Applications Design

[Seth Nickell <seth beauty stanford edu>]

http://www.gnome.org/~seth/Preferred-Apps-Mockup.png

Lets discuss starting with this mockup. In a week or so I'll try to
recruit somebody to write our current design.

Here some thoughts I used to guide this design:

1) Long term, the preferred applications system needs to either
complement or replace the file types system. Having both is confusing.

2) We need to show the same names/icons as the user sees in the
Applications menu (consistency)

3) The system needs to be extremely simple and quick or people will not
use it. Minimize clicks, minimize clutter.

4) Most of the time people will be picking applications that the system
knows about... custom applications is a more obscure case so we
shouldn't optimize the system around it.


Here are some of the trade-offs/questions in the current design:

1) Not "infinitely extendable" like a List would be. *However* a list
would cause more confusion and clutter. There are more choices in
interface design besides 0,1,n.

2) How many categories of application should be here? Should
applications be able to add new categories (I would say "no", since this
interface only makes sense for things where we expect multiple apps
fufilling the same role to be present on a system).

3) How do we find out what category apps are in? Using the keywords
stuff from the .desktop entries?

4) In the long long run how does this relate to an Applications menu
that contains only generic entries like "Web Browser" that are
preferences driven as to what web browser they launch?

-Seth