Re: [Usability] panel usability



Hi Boris ~

Sorry for the late reply, busy blah blah blah...

On Wed, 2003-11-12 at 23:16, Boris Goldowsky wrote:
> 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.

Sounds great!  I hope you'll have lots more suggestions from your
testing.

> 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.

This is a great point and I think the best thing you could do to help us
out with this is to file bugs [1] for these applications as you find
these problems.  Please try to search for existing bugs on this issue
before you file one.

>  - 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.

There have been many bugs filed about this already, it's a difficult
problem to handle but needs to be fixed. [2]

>  - 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.

A single specification is required for applications by the GNOME HIG
[3], if you find things that don't follow this please file bugs about
that as well and mark them as HIG bugs.

> 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.

Thanks for all your input, please feel free to continue to post your
findings to this list as well as filing bugs in our bugzilla system.

Thanks,
~ Bryan

[1] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/
[2] http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75796
[3]
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/draft_hig_new/input.html#mouse-interaction-applets


-- 
Bryan W Clark
Graduate Student
Math && Computer Science Dept.
Human Computer Interaction Group
Clarkson University
Potsdam, NY USA
 
http://www.clarkson.edu/~clarkbw/



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