Re: [Usability] Re: [Epiphany] epiphany toolbar/bookmarks

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

> I run a medium network for a university (about 18,000 users).  If you
> would be interested I could probably genereate some statistics based on
> what the users favorites folder and bookmarks.html is structured like. 
> It would take me a little bit to put together some scripts to do this,
> however it shouldn't be to terribly difficult.  I'm open to suggestions
> of what people would want to know as I have a pretty wide range of users
> from(students, faculty, staff, idiots, zealots, and etc).  

I'd really be interested in such datas ... I think info filtered by
Facult and student/staff.. would be interesting.

> The few things I would expect to see is 1) no organization just a list
> of bookmarks, 2) highly tree'ed list of bookmarks(as the user will
> bookmark every link in google for future reference), 3) little to no
> bookmarks but a toolbar with 5-10 links of highly visited sites.
> 
> I have a feeling a study(beyond my capabilities) would show that the
> people who don't use the hierarchies, is b/c the users just don't have
> good organization skills or they are lazy.

I'll just add users that doesnt have good computers skills. Navigating
and organizing deep hierarchies is a difficult task for most not
technical users ihmo.

> They don't know where things
> fit, and really need help choosing what is news and what is sports and
> etc(epiphany is already taking care of this user).  On that same note, I
> personally find the pop up dialog that lets you check where to put the
> bookmark really nice as it fixes the lazy problem(and helps nudge the
> user into choosing where things fit[organizing]).  Users bookmark
> something so they can get back to it, and then go on reading the page. 
> However, they never go back and move bookmark into a catagory.  Epiphany
> doesn't allow you to do this and hence takes care of one set of users
> and really encourages the other set.

I forgot pointing out this in the positive things about epiphany
bookmarks ... it's one of the things I care more, thanks ;)

> Personally, I find the new bookmark system to be one of the best
> "bookmark editors/catagorizers" out there.  However, for actually
> getting to the site, I find it rather cumbersome to open a new window
> click on a link in it and then close that window.   I believe(with
> nothing to back me up) that users just won't like the seperate window to
> just get to frequently visited sites(this is why I'm starting on a link
> toolbar as I get my arms around what all the sourcecode does)

Personally I think bookmarks should be accessible directly from the
desktop/panel. Click on "Web bookmarks", double click a bookmark in the
window -> a browser window is opened with that site.
This is very similar to what users does with Documents. (Click documents
folder, double click document ...).

I dont think this is particularly slow, still it can be annoying to deal
with more than one window for often used bookmarks.
Personally I use the autocompletion for sites I visit very very
frequently and that has the advantage to just work.
The alternatives are bookmarks toolbars and editable bookmarks menus
(like in Safari). But requiring to edit already ensure that a lot of
users will be left out of it.
Additionally I have still to see an intuitive implementation of
bookmarks toolbars. People have problems discovering the functionality
with epiphany, but with galeon which use a folder, it's exactly the
same. It happened a few days ago to be in #galeon and to help a user to
put something on the toolbar. It took some minutes to explain him how to
do it ...
That could have been an unfortunate case but it happened several times
to have to explain to users how to deal with that.

> On a final note, I would like to ask what peoples opinion of the "smart
> bookmark" that galeon has(as I would probably start coding on it, it
> appears the bookmark file is already able to handle it looking at some
> of the preloaded links)?  From personal experience, every user I have
> brought from windows to linux(or shown galeon too) after seeing the
> smartbookmark folder they were hooked.  I've had users that wouldn't go
> back to windows b/c they said they couldn't live with out that feature. 
> It is one of the things that I feel galeon got right.

Yeah epiphany support smart bookmarks. There is not a way to edit the
smart url because we thought exposing the %s thing in the interface was
not a good idea.
I think there are two approaches to expose the functionality:

1 Ship with some default smart bookmarks (google and dictionary for
example. Mantain a database like
http://galeon.sourceforge.net/bookmarks/ and have a default bookmark
pointing to it (maybe having the link in the docs too ?)
2 When the user bookmark an address like:
http://www.google.it/search?q=word&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=it&btnG=Cerca+con+Google&lr=

Have something like:

[ ] q - word
[ ] ie - UTF-8
[ ] oe - UTF-8
[ ] hl - it

etc ...

Which would allow to create the smart bookmark, but ... it's not
exactly friendly.

Marco