Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item



Havoc -

You're right... let's go beyond the idea of "Quit"... Let's examine the
desktop as a whole...

You said to me that it's just a plain fact that users don't understand
the idea of processes... in a hardcore UNIX sort of way, you're probably
right... but I think they have some sort of abstraction...

We may not be able to define application, but we certainly have some
good examples of them... Look in the GNOME menu under "Applications"...
each of these is in fact an application... AbiWord, Evolution, Galeon,
Mozilla, OO.o, all of them... And selecting them out of the GNOME menu
(the "start" menu in windows-ese) _starts_ the application...

Or look elsewhere in the GNOME menu... "Run Program"... What does "Run"
mean? What exactly are you running? A window?

My Gaim applet's context menu has "Quit" in it... What would "Close"
mean in that context? There's no window to close!

For other examples, think of the MacOS concept of "Hide" vs. "Quit"...
the user has an idea that "Hide" does not end the process... it does not
quit the application... the user can pick it right back up where they
left off... Quitting an application means "I'm done with this. Put it
away" whereas Hide means "I need this out of the way for the moment, but
I'm going to come back"... users do have the idea that "Quitting" throws
away what you were doing so that when you "Start" the application again,
you start from scratch, clean slate...

I (and I think Jeffrey and Ettore) don't think that these ideas are lost
on users... I don't think they're as abstract as you think... If I've
got three AbiWord documents open, I've got a good idea what to expect
from "Quit"... it means I don't want to use AbiWord anymore... put it
away so I can be done with it... Quitting doesn't refer to the UNIX
process... it refers to the human process...

You may say that these are just further implementation details to
hide... but I think our argument is that the concept of "processes" is
not unique to UNIX... they aren't unique to computers... I can "quit"
watching TV... I can "quit" reading a book... the concept of "quit"
means taking whatever it is you're doing and putting it away, so that
when you come back to it, you can start up fresh again...

Give users a little more credit...

-jag

-- 
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Joshua Adam Ginsberg	       Cellphone: 970.749.8530
Rice University '02	       Email: joshg myrealbox com
St. Mark's School of Texas '98
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safety." - Benjamin Franklin
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