Re: [Usability] Re: My humble experience about file managementthrough applications(was: [Yet Another] New File Chooser Design)

[Julien Olivier <julo altern org>]

> 1) Our central control environment is the START-/program-menu. No 
> documents, no music. Just applications. It's obvious that one will start 
> with Word.
> 

That's a good point. But to be fair, there is always the "home" icon on
the desktop, which - IMO - is even more visible than the applications
menu (because usually people tend to look at things from the top-left
corner to the bottom-right corner following a 'Z' shape). So maybe
renaming 'Documents' could help attracting users' attention.

More over, opening this 'home' folder doesn't give any clue about how to
do anything, which means that it's not obvious how to create a new
document in this folder...

> 2) If you create / change a file within an application one gets no 
> feedback that shows the object that has been changed. The user would 
> need to see what's happening with the file, e.g. in a spatial Nautilus 
> window (that is visible) a icon for this file should appear or change 
> its appearance.
> 

That could be good idea but there is at least 1 big problem: most of the
time, application windows cover almost the whole desktop. So users will
hardly notice any change on their documents' icons while the are editing
it.

> 3) The user sees many files and directories he doesn't know and doesn't 
> understand. Again there's no corespondance between his documents and the 
> files on the computer. He needs a view on his work / documents and not 
> on the system he doesn't understand anyway.
> 

In a *perfect* world, the home folder shouldn't be polluted by non
user-created files/folders (except dot-files). Of course there are still
a few apps breaking this "rule" (Evolution < 1.5, WindowMaker, X-Chat
etc...). And users should never have to open any folder below their home
folder.

> 1) One woman in our company does often have a fearful feeling when she 
> is doing something new in the area of file handling, like inserting a 
> picture in word, copying a file on a diskette, renaming a file, ... I 
> can observe these in a more light variation with other users that have a 
> application oriented mental model. Since they don't see where their work 
> is and what is happening with their work, they don't trust the computer. 
> I guess this is mostly because this model doesn't support these actions 
> very well.
> 

If some efforts are done to hide the file-system from the user, those
actions could be easier.

 - When opening a picture in order to insert it in your word processor,
the file selector should display all your pictures, filtered using
metadata or file name, and using a preview pane.

 - Copying a file to a disquette could be done by simply selecting the
"floppy" shortcut in the file save dialog.

 - Renaming a file should almost never be needed if you never use your
file manager to access your files.

> 2) Sharing data is harder to realize with this model. Since the user 
> thinks something like "my documents are in word" it's hard to imagine 
> how to share it (you would need to send Word :-) ).
> 

I'm not sure you're right here. How about having a "share this document"
entry in your word processor's menu ? Wouldn't it be an easy way to fix
this problem ? You could also have a "share library" entry in Rhythmbox,
a "share bookmarks" entry in Evolution or a "share calendar" in
Evolution.
Whether they use NFS/SMB, Apache or voodoo magic to actually share date
shouldn't be the user's problem, and sharing "abstract" data like a
calendar or bookmarks shouldn't be different from sharing a "concrete"
document (here "concrete" means that the document matches a user-visible
file).

> This is not something fantasy like. That's what I experienced. My 
> conclusion is that this model doesn't scale well for bigger problems you 
> want to solve with your computer. However, people want to do more and 
> more with their computer. We should try to support them.
> 

I think that this model, if not implemented in a consistent manner in
the whole desktop, can be confusing and make it harder to do what you
want to do. But the very same can be said for every model.

(snipped proposal)

> You can think of many more. I guess you know what I mean.
> 

All your ideas are good for a document-oriented model, but the real
question is: is the document-oriented model really easier to use than
the application-oriented model ? In my opinion, files are just an
abstract way of keeping data in memory and they shouldn't be exposed to
users (at least, never directly). In the few cases where users have to
load external files (like when inserting a picture in a text document),
the external files should be *very* easy to find (by always presenting
all of the matching files), logically sorted (using metadata) and well
presented (using document titles instead of file names and showing
previews). And, finally, 99% of file-oriented actions (sharing files,
moving files from one place to another) should be supported by
applications as well as the file-manager.

-- 
Julien Olivier <julo altern org>