Re: [Usability] Some usability feedback

[Jamie McCracken <jamiemcc blueyonder co uk>]

On Sat, 2004-11-27 at 13:33 +0100, Maurizio Colucci wrote:
> 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.

Yes this is on my wishlist too. Unfortunately we have been waiting a
long time for medusa (which is Nautilus' search companion and its a lot
better than the gnome-search-tool). I hope we will get something here by
Xmas (if not I might have to implement my own thing!)


>  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".)

Ctrl+S brings up the pattern matcher which kinda works that way.

> 
> - 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.

That does need attending but I suspect its very low priority at the
moment.

> 
> - 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.

Thats a tricky one - some say its better to have browser as default
cause most people are used to that whilst others say spatial is better
for grandma (and other computer illiterates) and thats why its the
default.

> 
> - 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.

yep - the browser nautilus should be redone in my opinion to create
something more resembling the file chooser with bookmarks in the left
hand treeview.

> 
> - 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.

That would be a handy application to have

> 
> - 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).

It would be nice if Rhythmbox could burn audio CDs (I suspect this is
already a feature request).


Thanks for the feedback,

jamie.

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