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

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Mon, 9 May 2005, Marc O'Morain wrote:

> Date: Mon, 9 May 2005 17:23:20 +0100
> From: Marc O'Morain <marc omorain gmail com>
> To: usability gnome org
> Subject: Re: [Usability] Re: Deep thoughts and proposal on the awful
>     trashcan/eject issue (long)
>
> Hi all,
>
> Drawing inspiration from the drive mount applets, and the MS Windows
> way of dealing with removable media, how about the following proposal:

Up front I have to say I always quite liked how the mac did things (so
there's my bias), even if the metaphor of putting things in the trash was
a bit weird it worked fairly well (and I recall they had something
equivlent to an Eject action somewhere near the Shutdown menu item).

> 1. Require that users have a system tray on their panel.

Difficult to require something like that, not a good sign either.

> 2. When a removable drive is inserted (and automatically mounted), an
> icon that represents the device will appear in the system tray. When a
> camera is inserted a camera icon is used, when a USB pen drive is
> inserted, a little USB drive icon is shown.

This seems to me like an abuse of the notification area, using it to show
state rather than notifying the user of the change of state.  Not that I
mind, I think we've already failed to enforce the concepts people were
pushing for with the notification area and it is little better than the
windows system tray.

> 3. If the user clicks on the icon, a menu opens, allowing the user to
> open the device in the file manager, to 'stop' the device for safe
> removal.

I've always thought this was bullshit, J5 suggested a caching approach
that could mitigate against any data loss.

> 4. If the user clicks the stop menu item, the icon is removed from the
> panel, and a message box appears saying the device has been stopped
> correctly, and that it is now safe to remove the device.
> 5. If the user removes the device without stopping it first, a message
> box appears telling the user not to do that again, showing them a
> picture of the icon and the 'stop this device' menu item highlighed,
> so that they will know what to do in future.

I find those messages annoying and unhelpful, and I just ignore them even
though I know I probably shouldn't.  I have a good idea of when my file
transfers are complete, and desktop users can reasonably be expect to be
using graphical applications will very likely have progress indicators so
I expect they will have a reasonably good sense of when the transfer is
done.

> Notes:
> Rather than 'unmount', Windows users the term 'stop the device'. I
> know a lot of non-technical Windows users, and none of them are
> confused by the metaphor of having to "stop" a removable device. The
> 'Safely Remove Hardware' applet in the Window's system tray is very
> badly designed however.

I find it immensely annoying and if the solution J5 proposed is workable
it sounds far far better.

I was a little sceptical of the idea of ejecting things by trashing them
but the comments that started this whole thread convinced me that it
should be done because it is a reasonable way to meet a certain category
of user expectations and is a much safer action than assuming users want
to erase their removable drive and it sure beats doing nothing.  The
original poster described it much better though.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/
http://livejournal.com/users/alanhorkan/