[Usability] Killing Views Part 2 - The return of the Usabilty study

[Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>]

We recently had a discussion about killing nautilus internal file
views. And it was one of those issues that I wished I had some
usability statistics to back it up.

Today I've been reading the usability review that sun did of
Gnome 1.2 and came accross this page:
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/file_management.html

Users were confused by the read only view of a text file and 
said things like:
"I was expecting a word processing app to open [the file]...weird."
"I was confused when the text file opened in a browser type thing."

The sun reccomendation was to make it more clear that the file is
read only, but I would say that it makes more sense to remove the
internal viewing of files in nautilus all together, now that nautilus is
no longer used as a web browser.

There is no real benefit to viewing a text file or image in nautilus
AFAICT, but there are definately drawbacks, and as that usability
study shows, it causes user frustration and confusion.

I don't want to start another holy war. But I would love to get a
response from the nautilus maints for or against this. The rest of us
can argue to we go blue in the face, but if the maints aren't listening
then there is no point.

Thanks for you time,

-- 
Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>