Re: [Usability] Content Separation in GNOME

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Mon, 2005-04-04 at 02:34 +0100, Alan Horkan wrote:
> On Sun, 3 Apr 2005, Ivan Gyurdiev wrote:

> > I would like to propose introducing content folders to GNOME, similar to
> > Windows' "My Documents", "My Music", etc.. this will improve usability
> 
> Some distributions have already done this.  I want to smack them really
> hard with a wet fish for using that annoying "My " prefix in front of
> everything.

The "My" prefix to things is annoying, but I can see how it would
alleviate some confusion to users who are migrating from Windows,
to our lovely desktop. I still hate it now though.

> Some users have their home directory set as their desktop and while I'd
> like to call them rude names and ignore them for being so weird that
> doesn't seem to be an option.  They would not be impressed if you added
> yet another folder to their beloved home directories.

I would be fine with ~/Documents, ~/Movies, and whatnot. What I wouldn't
be fine with is having a "Desktop" directory, on my desktop, which is my
$HOME. I think it would be fine to provide a few default content
folders, but I don't think we should overdo it. The big problem here, is
and always has been, translating the folder names to different strings.
Sure, if we ignore every other piece of software out there that isn't
Gnome/GTK+, or potentially KDE/QT, then it's much simpler. But as soon
as a user opens a terminal and types "ls", they are going to say "WTF?".
I think we should worry about solving it for the entire desktop, not
just our desktop.

> (I'm grossly over simplifying because I'm in a hurry but) The solution I
> thought was most promising was to have:
> ~/Documents/
> and various subfolders of that.
> 
> (Some people *cough* developers *cough* have difficulty getting their head
> round all users files even non office related files, things like movies
> and mp3s being refferred to as documents.  From what I understand though
> Gnome is supposed to be "document based" as opposed to say "task based"
> interface.)

"Document based" is a rather generic term, which often ends up confusing
people into thinking everything should be a document. That's not really
the case though. Movies are movies. Audio is audio. Documents are
documents. And tarballs may contain video, audio, still images, and
documents, but they aren't necessarily documents themselves. Users
aren't going to call them documents either. I would even go so far as to
say that users don't refer to all files created by office suites, as
documents either. They will say "presentation", or "spreadsheet", and
generally refer to a "document" as something that came from word,
acrobat, or the like. A form or letter, for example. I'm not sure we
want to shove everything under ~/Documents as such. In fact, I store
music and movies under appropriate directories in ~/Downloads currently,
which may actually make more sense. It needs a lot more thought, and
possibly a lot of extended user testing.

-- dobey