[Usability] Re: Usability Digest, Vol 16, Issue 21

[Daniel F Moisset <dmoisset arnet com ar>]

On Thu, 2005-08-25 at 22:24, usability-request gnome org wrote:
> 18. Having all his applications on one desktop, he now starts to drag
> the windows to the Workspace Switcher to drop them on other desktops.
> This doesn't work, and I guide him to the context menu at the title
> bar, and he uses the "Move to another desktop" menu to position
> Firefox, Thunderbird and OOo Writer on the appropriate desktops. He
> then asserts that the Window Switcher applet is now useless and
> removes it. He also removes the Show/Hide Desktop applet. This
> effectively turns the Workspace Switcher into the Window Switcher.
> I can't really grasp why he finds this superior to the standard Window
> Switcher, but he does.

I find this one fascinating. I think it would be really cool to test
this kind of setup with other people that uses always a few
applications...

What your parents did was turning your screen/desktops into something
much more like an appliance. Other devices at your home work like this:
I have a TV and a VCR; they both interact, but each one has a specific
funcionality, and controls adapted to that functionality. Instead of
having a unified dynamic interface (like computers do), I know that the
grey square box is the TV (and it has controls to turn the volume up,
change the constrast), and the black flat box below is the VCR (and it
has controls to start recording, or ejecting the tape). I don't have to
search in which "dialog" the stop button is and where is that dialog.
The stop button is at the VCR, and the VCR is at the shelf right below
the TV.

This desktop layout is the same. Instead of having moving, resizable
windows in a computer with three functionalities (web browsing, email,
writing documents), he has "three" appliances side by side (well, in a
virtual sense of "side-by-side" at least). He has the "web machine" at
the left, the "email system" at the middle and the "electronic
typewriter" at the right.

I know that this is similar to the things that lots of power users do,
having special purpose desktops; however it is taking it to the extreme,
removing the need for window sitching. It reminds me also to the change
from evolution1 to evolution2 (where you have a "calendar mode" instead
of "calendar folders"). I think the paradigm can be very useful to
people who need to do a few tasks (but more than one), and have
difficulties with window managing (i know my parents do).

btw, I did a similar study some time before. I never published it
because the results were old when I decided to finish it (I used
Mandrake 9.2 + Gnome 2.4); a lot of the bugs I found are corrected
now... but found a lot of useful information with very little effort.

Something that I found too, is that they found several problems similar
to yours when switching, but after a couple of months they had already
grasped the "philosophy" of the desktop and they were less surprised by
new things (crashing against some usability bug from time to time). So I
believe some dstinction should be maed about "usability for new users"
and "usability for old users"

Perhaps some guidelines about how to do this more organizedly would be
great (I'm sure there are lot of hackers trying to convert their
parents/girlfriend/aunt Tillie's).

	Daniel

-- 
Must it be assumed that because we are engineers beauty is not our concern,
and that while we make our constructions robust and durable we do not also
strive to make them elegant?
Is it not true that the genuine conditions of strength always comply
with the secret conditions of harmony?
    -- Gustave Eiffel, 1887