[Usability] Re: display full path in spatial nautilus



Calum Benson writes:

using the full path leads to more confusion than gain. We lose a major benefit of the spatial browser, mainly by adding more conginitive load to interpret wtf /home/dave/folder1/documents means.

Oh I dunno, shouldn't part of the point of a spatial browser that you
can always tell where in your folder space you happen to be? :)

But does /home/dave/whatever really tell a user where they are?[1] Lets look at the problems. First identifying an open window. With a the fullpath in the title the user needs to scan the whole string and interpret it, if they even can. Without the fullpath, the user looks at the title and just simply knows they are looking at "Documents." No need to compute, no mental load, this is the folder I'm in. This is how macos has worked forever (well at least through Os9, I'm not sure about osX). Now the mac also had a rather nice titlebar feature for moving up the filesystem hierarchy from your current folder as well. You could click the folder's titlebar and the whole directory hierarchy for the current folder would be shown in a menu. So for instance if you were viewing /home/dave/whatever you could click the titlebar to get back to dave or home or /. dave [1] Seth doesn't seem to think so either http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2002-September/msg00014.html



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