Re: [Usability] Deep thoughts and proposal on the awful trashcan/eject issue (long)

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

> *Add an eject menu to the desktop action menu. This would allow a
> quicker way to eject things without needing to right click or go to the
> desktop or open "Computer" first.

Is an eject menu significant enough to most users to be included by
default in Actions?

Consider how often users have to eject a device per session - some (a
photographer, for example) will be plugging & unplugging digital
cameras all day, whereas your 'average office secretary' might eject a
CD once in a month, or never.

For the photographer, someone who you might expect to be a more
competent user, you're over-simplifying things. For the potentially
less-competent secretary, you're adding clutter to the interface &
making more commonly used options in 'Actions' harder to find.

So I don't personally think this is the way to go. Using Trash is a
good idea & while not consistant it should be an option. You could
turn it off (or on) in Preferences if you wanted to, similar to the
choice between spatial & navigational nautilus.

> Dragging things on the trashcan should always make them 'disappear'
> (well, be put in the trashcan for normal files and folders, but that
> would be of no use for removable media, so the next best thing is
> ejecting). Being consistent as far as possible, in the bounds of
> what is practical / efficient.

The way trashing volumes works should be refined - some operations are
bound to be ambiguous. In this situation, you can't just presume that
the user wants to eject a volume - they might want to format it or
they might have dragged it over the icon by mistake (unlikely, but
hey). We can't just guess at what the user wants to do, they have to
make the decision, not the developer.

I've thought of a couple of ways around this:

- Use modifier keys or different mouse-clicks - dragging to trash
ejects the volume, Ctrl + Drag erases the volume, or left-click drag
ejects & right-click drag erases.

> Back when I used Macs for the first time, I never had the idea to
> drag a floppy or cd to the trashcan, until I was told of that possibility
> and it's outcome.

Yes, the flaw with this method is that it requires the user to learn
about which type of click to use from somewhere.

- Display a menu. The suggestion of using an info box is a little
fiddly - it pops up centre-screen, the user has to read it etc etc. If
this happens every time, user gets fed up. If they can choose a
default action to perform each time it's better, but still fiddly & if
they want to perform an action different to the default it's a pain to
change.

> Right. This behaviour does not meat users expectations, as nobody
> will want to bring that message dialog up. An having to read / click
> that dialog is a waste of time.

I was thinking of a menu sort of a cross between a right-click context menu:

* opens up near the cursor
* options activated by a single left-click
* item highlight follows mouse
* the menu disappears when anything is clicked, either inside or
outside the menu

And the Windows XP Autoplay menu:

* big, multiline options with icons (looks pretty)
* white background for legibility, not context-menu-grey
* explains the action in a grey summary under the action's name

This menu should have no chrome (like a context menu) & should have
the items ordered in terms of how likely they are to be the user's
choice (unmount first, erase second) with appropriate icons.

Screenshots:

XP Autoplay:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/01/11/autoplay/autoplayfig04.gif
(the white option area only, ignore the rest of the window)

Context menu:
http://www.gnome.org/~jrb/files/mime/context-open-other.png

I don't know if this idea would work or not, but it could potentially
be quite efficient & easy to use; it presents options in a nice way
which should be pretty helpful to new users (text), quick for
established users (icons) & could sort out the problem of action
ambiguity. I could do a mock-up if I haven't explained very well.

Thanks, hope this is of help

-- 
Phil Bull
philbull.tk