Re: [Usability] [Yet Another] New File Chooser Design

[Walter Bamberger <Walter Bamberger myTUM de>]

I totally agree with Federico's point that the starting point for all 
good interface designs is a use case specification and a functional 
specification. And as everyone can read there are a few differences what 
people what it to be in this thread.

I'm managing and supporting a small network and I've surprisingly 
realized in the past that some totally unexperienced users in my company 
use the file open dialog of Word for managing files in a simple way 
because they don't really know the Windows Explorer (or don't want to 
use it since they rarely do file managing stuff).

And for me as a more experienced user I like to do sometimes managing 
stuff in such a dialog when I see that something is wrong. And it's 
simpler than opening just another application.

Thus maybe one should try to look at this topic in a slightly different 
way. I'm not pretty sure that it's the right way. But what is right ? 
And it's interesting anyway:
There were some thoughts in the past of a more object oriented than 
application oriented user interface. There you would say: "I want to 
edit this file", rather than "I have to open this application and than I 
can open this file". In this paradigm one central point is the file 
manager since files are your central objects. Looking at this, opening a 
file means getting another view of the file manager and choosing the 
file in there. This way the file open dialog is not simply a modal 
dialog but another view of the file manager. And doesn't even need to be 
modal as Liam mentioned before. Instead you get a specialized view of 
the file manager (in for programmers: it could be a bonobo object of 
Nautilus with a simplified UI). And when users can deduce it from 
Nautilus than it's not a non-intuitive exception as Liam said.

But most important: Where can I find a current functional specification 
of the file dialog and the discussion about it?

Thanks,


Walter