[Usability] Re: epiphany toolbar/bookmarks

["David Adam Bordoley" <bordoley msu edu>]

Marcelo E. Magallon writes: 

> 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. 
>
>    I want to bookmark something and assign it to topic T2 which does not
>    exist yet.  I have to open the bookmarks window, create a new topic,
>    close that window and then file -> add bookmark and select the newly
>    created topic. 

This is a non-issue. File->bookmark page. Don't assign a topic. Open the 
bookmark window, file->new topic, dnd the bookmark from uncategorized  to th 
e new topic. 

I suspect most users will create a small limited number of topics to use. 
Maybe 20 or so. So adding the ability to create new topics in the new 
bookmark dialog will just lead to alot of uneeded complexity. In fact apple 
even agrees here and does provide a way to create new "folders" from its new 
bookmark dialog either. 

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

GTK bug... 

>    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 plan to fix this in the future by supporting multiple selections in the 
topics list. 

>    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.

this can all be done through dnd. there is a gtk bug about supporting 
multiple selections with the mouse that will be helpful for rubberbanding 
large numbers of bookmarks here. 

>  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. 
>
>  > - 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?)

This is where having richer metadata from the page will come handy. I think 
we should use page meta tags that are provided in the html headers by page 
so that you can search based on these, though i wouldn't expose this in the 
ui at all.  Its worth noting that the traditional hierarchy based bookmarks 
system here is actually worst, since it forces the user to micro manage 
their bookmark collection. 

Another good idea would be to provide someway to created new topics based on 
searches. (actually now that i think of it this is already possible. [1] do 
a search, [2] create a new topic, [3]dnd all bookmarks from the search to 
the topic. 


dave