Re: [Usability]Keeping the Quit menu item

[Calum Benson <calum benson sun com>]

On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 17:34, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-03-20 at 17:28, Calum Benson wrote:
> 
> > FWIW, some anecdotal evidence from one of the other usability guys
> here:
> 
> And some more:

And three more, turned out to be quite a hot topic amongst our guys too
:)

> I'll point out that you are all talking desktop apps,
> which makes sense given Calum's question was prompted
> by Gnome discussion.
> 
> That said, remember that more and more people are using
> devices that provide no concept of 'quit' the way you
> are using it, and that trend is only going to grow...

---

> I trust Dave's judgment about those issues in the context of OpenDoc's 
> situations of use--tasks on a desktop involving documents that users 
> were already accustomed to thinking of as "files."  But I don't think 
> that OpenDoc experience is generalizable very far beyond those 
> particular situations of use, so I agree with Frank's response.
> 
> In dozens of telecom products we renamed 
> the File menu to Switch, or Card, or Customer, or whatever the users 
> thought was the type of object.  That worked great because those objects 
> clearly were not files, and the users could not conceive of them being 
> files.  An individual object's attributes weren't even stored in a 
> single file, often their attributes were distributed across several 
> databases.  
> 
> We also eliminated the Quit command from a few products by using some of 
> the techniques Frank described.  That worked fine.
> 
> I agree with Eric's point that there is an increasing number of 
> computing environments in which there is no notion of Quit.  I believe 
> that will weaken the existing user expectation of Quit in the desktop 
> environment.
> 
> I'm sticking by my longstanding objection to the Quit command, because 
> of its enforcement of an application orientation. "Quit" is not needed
> as a way to close all other windows.  We used to provide a "Close Other
> Windows" menu choice in a "Windows" menu, along with other window 
> management choices.

---

> I'll chime in with a related issue.  I am a crusader for the 
> elimination of Save commands.  Do you have to press Save on your Palm 
> Pilot to get it to remember what you typed?  Why not?
> 
> But I've had problems with this model in some applications, basically 
> because people have built up a set of bad habits around save (e.g., 
> plan to keep the current version as an 'old version', and so type 
> away, and then do a Save As under a new name; play around, knowing 
> they can get back to the old version just by not saving).  I have had 
> to back out of such models.
> 
> This reminds me of research I did in the early 80s around voice mail 
> (can you imagine that this was once a research topic?)  One of my 
> colleagues got an answering machine, and was able to measure the 
> hangups.  At that time 85% of callers would hang up answering machines 
> were very rude -- now people complain if you don't have them).  So 
> people do change their models, but over time (I would say it took 10 
> years for the change in attitudes about answering machines and voice 
> mail), and during the transition it's hard to make a 'right' decision.


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