Re: Workspaces [Re: [Usability] nautilus, panel, and metacity not acting as if the desktop was a single entity]

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

On 7/13/05, Eric Larson <elarson novell com> wrote:
> But, I do think that pushing the user to consider grouping their
> applications would be a worthwhile task to gain the advantages
> of workspaces.

This is just introducing extra window-management workload for the
user, and I'm not sure the advantages will outweigh this disadvantage
(especially for novice users). Besides, is it right to try and push
the user into one way (your way?) of working? Surely it would be
better to accommodate/allow different styles of working, so that the
user can do things in whatever way feels most comfortable to them?

App grouping is potentially a pretty rigid organisational concept (as
mentioned before, group-by-task or group-by-type), so I'm not sure if
everyone will enjoy using it. I mean, look what happened with spatial
nautilus...not all users like it, so their desktop experience has, to
them, been degraded. Just because you like one way of working and it
suits you doesn't mean other others will, and this has always been the
problem with user interface design.

On 7/13/05, Daniel Borgmann <daniel borgmann gmail com> wrote:
> On the other hand, multiple workspaces are nothing more than
> "additional space", which is basically a dead-simple concept.

Well, surely there is some way of providing extra space which is easily:

- managed
- discovered
- utilised

by users, whether power users or novices? There are a lot of ways of
approaching this I think - stick with the workspace concept and draw
more attention to the pager, use a big previewing pager (see
Luminocity), use a screen space which pans when you (for example) hold
down the middle mouse button, have a pager which grows in size on
mouse-over (like the OS X dock with icon zooming) etc etc.

At the end of the day I think it should probably come down to
prototyping a few different approaches and testing them on users.
Anyone have a copy of Flash?

Just my 2c.

-- 
Phil Bull
philbull.tk