[Usability] Re: epiphany toolbar/bookmarks

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

Stephen Blake writes: 

> On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 14:45, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Fri, May 30, 2003 at 05:48:17PM +0200, Marcelo E. Magallon wrote: 
> > >  > - 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?) 
> >
> > It seems like there might be some cheesy hack to allow topics to be
> > hierarchized; for example, I can imagine creating topics with "/" in
> > the name:
> >  
> >  Foo/Bar
> >  Foo/Baz 
> >
> > Would it be a total hack if that was magically used to generate
> > submenus? Probably so. ;-)
>
> How about a not-so-cheesy tree hack solution: Imagine the following list
> of bookmarks and their categories (with apologies to any BSD zealots out
> there ;) ): 
>
> Slashdot: News, Zealotry
> OSNews: News, Operating Systems
> FreeBSD: Operating Systems, Zealotry
> CNN: News 
>
> I can imagine the following (but not the only) tree we could generate
> from this (monospaced font required), where a * is a bookmark. 
>
> All
>   +- News
>   |    +- Zealotry
>   |    |    +- * Slashdot
>   |    +- * Slashdot
>   |    +- * OSNews
>   |    +- * CNN
>   +- Zealotry
>   |    +- News
>   |    |    +- * Slashdot
>   |    +- Operating Systems
>   |    |    +- * FreeBSD
>   |    +- * Slashdot
>   |    +- * FreeBSD
>   +- Operating Systems
>        +- Zealotry
>        |    +- * FreeBSD
>        +- * OSNews
>        +- * FreeBSD 
>
> Hmm, too complicated? Maybe. Too many duplicate entries? Perhaps. But
> maybe it's a start. Maybe we eliminate the (possibly very large)
> intersection lists, forcing the user to navigate to the most specific
> instance, i.e.: 
>
> All
>   +- News
>   |    +- Zealotry
>   |    |    +- * Slashdot
>   |    +- * OSNews
>   |    +- * CNN
>   +- Zealotry
>   |    +- News
>   |    |    +- * Slashdot
>   |    +- Operating Systems
>   |    |    +- * FreeBSD
>   +- Operating Systems
>        +- Zealotry
>        |    +- * FreeBSD
>        +- * OSNews 
>
> Well, it's obviously not a fully baked idea, but what do you think? 
>
> Stephen 
>
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Such hacks are probably not a good idea for a few reaons:
1. Doesn't scale to bookmarks associated with mulitple topics
2. Sub-menus are inherintly hard to use, hence when you have more than one 
level of submenus you make the ALL menu completely pointless since it will 
be incredibly slow to access anything from it.[1] This is all in the HIG. 

dave 

[1] I'm fairly certain that if you did a real world test of this and asked a 
user to find a random bookmark you could show (using the stop watch) that 
using the bookmarks window search interface is even more efficient than 
using the "all" bookmarks menu, especially for large collections.