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

[Marco Pesenti Gritti <mpeseng tin it>]

On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 17:48, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote:
> On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 12:42:26PM +0200, Marco Pesenti Gritti wrote:
> 
>  > 4 Interesting. I see lot of people on gnomedesktop complaining about
>  > it and some others saying that they started to use bookmarks only
>  > with epiphany. What are people complaining about ?
> 
>  * Adding bookmarks is not easy in the non-trivial case.

See http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=110640 about this, you may
want to put your comments there.


>  * Currently managing large collections of bookmarks is cumbersome.
> 
>    To keep it short: it's too slow.  It searches as I type, which
>    degrades interactivity.

Definately, it's a gtk issue though and there is a fix for it.

>    Searching itself is not easy.  I know I have a bookmark about X but
>    I'm not sure what I called it.  I browse the topic list and I see
>    topic T0 which might be related to X.  The set is still too large.
>    Topic T1 is also related to that, but there doesn't seem to be a way
>    to display the intersection of T0 and T1.

We are considering a good ui to allow intersections ... it's not a very
easy issue, but I think we will come with something.

>    I want to add already existing bookmarks to this newly created topic
>    T2.
> 
>         Bookmarks window -> Search bookmark -> Properties -> Check topic
>         in the topics list.
> 
>    That's ok for one bookmark, but if you are dealing with several of
>    them the task is painful.  It's not as far fetched as you might
>    think.  Consider this: when you start bookmarking you have a little
>    set of topics because it does not make sense to bookmark something
>    and assign it to five different topics if the only entry in those
>    five topics is this one bookmark.  At some point your list of
>    bookmarks grows big and you start assigning more topics to already
>    existing bookmarks to make them easier to find.  Presto.

You can drag it (them) on the topic ...

>  Wish: an easy way to see "related" bookmarks.  I have a bookmark B0
>  with topics T0, T1 and T2 (all of them are very orthogonal).  I'm
>  looking at T0.  In order to find out that B0 is in T1, too, I have to
>  look at its properties and scroll thru the list of topics until I
>  notice that T1 is also checked.  Now I have to search for T1 in the
>  topics list and select it in order to see which other bookmarks are
>  related to B0.

Can you explain in which context a faster way to see which topics a
bookmark is related to, is useful ?

>  > - Searches are currently not very "rich", so if you have 2000
>  > bookmarks, it can be hard to find them. But on the long time a
>  > database approach is obviously the best also for people with so many
>  > bookmarks.
> 
>  With a large collection there's another problem: the list of topics is
>  also potentially large.  Just finding a topic is in itself a difficult
>  task.  I'm not sure if there's a solution for this problem (other than
>  just "that's your problem, think of better topics" -- well, I'm not a
>  librarian, ook?)

I'll just note that subfolders are not a real solution. They are hard to
edit and hard to navigate. Maybe they will work for 1% of users ... but
we should aim to something better.
Apparently some people with large collections are switching to epiphany
exactly for this reason, so I think it already works better than
hierarchy for big collections.
Improving searchability and allow intersections will allow to keep the
number of topics lower.
A database approach is conceptually more likely to scale better than an
hierarchy, if it still doesnt for someone it means we need to improve
it.

>  > The solution is clear here ihmo. Have more metadata on the bookmark
>  > (for example keywords).
> 
>  For example?

For example putting informations about the site content in it. The meta
tag used by search engines (not sure how it's called, keywords ?) is the
first thing that come to my mind. I'm sure that are other ways too ...

Quoting a Dave mail on ephy-dev

"The epiphany system currently  is really simple here, it provides
searching by topic, name and address. Ideally this needs to be expanded
to allow searching based on more verbose search phrases such as "All
bookmarks from the last two weeks" or "All sites I visited over a month
ago" etc. Just examples though. This is a very difficult problem and
really extends more generally to the filesystem as well."

Marco