[Usability] Some usability feedback

[Maurizio Colucci <seguso forever tin it>]

Hello,

Yesterday I had my cousin try Gnome2.8 (Ubuntu). He is a windows XP user 
who only uses its system for word processing and multimedia. Age 35. 
Profession: university professor (law).

He was impressed, but found some missing things and I thought you could 
be interested.

- He was annoyed by the difficulty of searching a folder (he has some 
very long folders). He saw the gnome-search-tool in the menu, but he did 
not like to have to locate the folder in the file-selection dialog, 
since he was already viewing the folder in nautilus. He suggested to add 
a "search this folder" option in the right-button menu of nautilus. He 
also suggested a quick-search box to quickly find things in long 
folders, like in thunderbird (which he uses). He discovered nautilus 
scrolls when you press a letter, but this wasn't sufficient for him. (In 
Windows he uses the "advanced search tool".)

- He complained there is no way to set the permissions/owner of a 
folder, and all its children (recursively). I could not suggest anything 
else than "chown" and "chmod", but he refused to use the terminal.

- He was puzzled by spatial nautilus, especially the fact that, when you 
double click a folder, the parent is not closed. He did not discover 
middle click. When I told him to just middle-click, he said he did not 
like to do it. "I hate clicking the wheel, I feel like I am breaking the 
mouse. Also, I don't see why the folders don't close automatically".

- When I told him to activate nonspatial mode, he liked it a lot, 
because of the "history" side-panel, which I activated. He said the 
history side-panel is "better than windows". But he did not discover it 
by himself.

- He complained mildly about not having links to common places, like he 
has in explorer's sidebar, in windows Xp. When I told him to use 
bookmarks, he was happy, but he said he would not have discovered it by 
himself.

- Initially, he could not locate his windows partitions. He complained 
there is no graphical representation of them. (But I suspect this is an 
ubuntu problem, since in fedora I recall the disk were there.) 
Furthermore, they were not mounted automatically, and I found no 
graphical tool to do that. I had to launch parted and edit fstab, which 
he didn't like.

- He switched nautilus to single-click mode and list-view mode, but 
could not tolerate the files to be underlined. When I told him not to 
use list-view, because he could switch the sorting in icon view as well, 
he was happy.

- He did not like to have to use k3b for burning audio cds, but I could 
not point it to any other way (I myself switched to gnome very recently).


Cheers,
Maurizio Colucci
http://onefinger.sf.net