[Usability] panel usability



Hi all.

Our Linux machine has recently become the primary computer for our family (switching from Mac OS X), so we've been running a bit of a usability test case.

Basically, everyone's been happy with the transition, so many thanks and congratualtions are in order for making gnome a very friendly and usable environment! In the hopes of making it better, though, this message concentrates on the problems encontered...

It turns out the biggest confusion has been the transition from Mac OSX dock to Gnome panel.

[For those not familiar with it, the Mac's "dock" has an icon for each currently-running or commonly-used application (you can drag & drop them there), so it is like a combination of the panel launchers and the window list. Clicking on an icon brings the program to the front, starting it if it is not currently running but otherwise simply un-hiding and fronting its windows.]

Usability issues with the panel have been the following:

- clicking on panel launchers for currently-running programs, hoping to bring them forward. In many cases, this starts a new instance of the program instead. Some, like Mozilla and epiphany, have internal logic to just open a new window rather than start a new instance of the program. Most simpler programs, however, do not, so you get an extra Gnucash, or Print Manager, etc.

- double-clicking a launcher is the same, only twice as bad. You get TWO instances of a program attempting to start at the same time. That's slow, and for programs without a clear startup notification, often an impatient user will try clicking again to fix things. Then (early in this transition) they would come and ask me why nothing's working. By the time I got there, there would be half a dozen Mozilla windows stacked up.

- The mail notification applet requires a double click if you want to use it for starting your email application. Also desktop and nautilus icons require double-clicks. Sticky notes does not behave like the launchers; it toggles. I can see arguments for all these behaviors, but collectively they caused quite a bit of confusion at first.

My conclusions? 1. It would be very nice if everything on the panel would be "de-bounced", and treat a double click as equivalent to a single click, unless some other behavior is explicitly configured. In no case should a double click open two new windows or two new programs -- the habit of double-clicking to launch things is just too well established. If you really wanted two new windows, you would give two clicks with some time in between.

2. All launchers should just tell the application to open a new window, rather then starting a new instance of the program. If the program cannot do that (eg, Gnucash), then the launcher should just make the existing windows visible. Starting another instance of an app, while there may be use cases that require it, as far as I can see would be of interest only to relatively experienced users, and so could be accessed through a menu or a configuration option of the launcher.

3. Startup notifications are critical. I'm happy to see them starting to become more common.

Sorry if some of this is old hat -- I'm just hoping to provide some useful data on what confused a couple of new users. Feel free to draw your own conclusions from it.

Boris





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