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

[Stephen Blake <seb iostream org>]

On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 15:31, David Adam Bordoley wrote:
> Stephen Blake writes: 
> 
> Such hacks are probably not a good idea for a few reaons:
> 1. Doesn't scale to bookmarks associated with mulitple topics

My example had some with multiple topics, but I guess you mean many
topics. Someone smarter than me could mathematically figure out the
formula for given N bookmarks, m topics, with z% topic overlap, how big
does the tree get. Practially speaking, though, how many topics is a
user going to assign to each bookmark. I'd say 10 is an extreme upper
bound. Average user will have 1-3 per bookmark, I would guess. I think 4
is my maximum.

> 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. 

Hey, you're preaching to the choir, here. :) I love the bookmark system
how it is, so far, for the most part. I'm just brainstorming solutions
for the people who need a hierarchy (I'm not one of them.)

> 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.

I think you're absolutely right. Using the Go menu for my frequently
used bookmarks, and searching in the Bookmark window meets my needs
fairly well. I think there's room for incremental improvements such as
the ones being talked about for topic intersection, etc., too, though.

Stephen