Re: [Usability] User problems and practices with modern desktopsystems

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 8 Nov 2004 john erling blad aftenposten no wrote:

> Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 15:40:58 +0100
> From: john erling blad aftenposten no
> To: lutz familieMuellerInRemscheid de, usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] User problems and practices with modern
>     desktopsystems
>
> My current occupation is archival systems so I'm familiar with some of
> the problems with search, retrieval and presentation of documents.
>
> Hm, this became a bit lengthy..
>
> > your email reflects a lot of what I'm thinking about a while.
> > I wasn't shure if this list is the right place for this ideas. And
> > please forgive me my english :)
>
> My english is even worse! :)


> A journalist might write 10-20-30 articles a day (or even more), or
> something like 2 - 10 000 articles a year. It will soon be apparent that
> you can't continue to dump articles in a single directory for very long.

This reminds my why I am so glad that we have a standard system for
Recent files it goes a long way to taking the sting out of finding
documents as in most cases the last documents you used are most likely to
be ones you will want to use again.
What I think we are missing is a standard "Document History" for the
document that overflow and leave the Recent files list.  With a document
history you can massively reduce the search space to only the documents
that were used previously in the current application.

I make massive use of this kind of functionality, my Mozilla History file
is over 15 MB at the moment (and the history file on my laptop is probably
even more massive) but it is easily searchable so I can get away with it.
My history file in graphics application runs to only a few hundreds files
but despite not being searchable is still quite useful.

This problem can be and should be tackled from both directions, although
automatically aggregating and searching information is useful it is also a
good idea to encourage users to organise their data little better.

Recently on the desktop-devel list  Marc O'Morain brought back up the
notion of standard folders like Docmuments, Pictures, and so on but
unfortunately it suffered the bikeshed effect and the discussion didn't go
very far but I believe he intended to formalise his ideas and push them
again soon.  I hope he does.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
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