[Usability] Usability and Various Topaz Concept Designs

[Sarah Berry <sberry grex cyberspace org>]

Dear All,

I have been looking at the various designs and concepts for Topaz currently being touted by members of the community.  

As there is no timeframe yet for Topaz (so far as I am aware) I was wondering which, if any of these ideas could be looked at for late inclusion in the 2.x series, unless it is considered too late to make any radical changes.

It seems we have some very talented people amongst us with some great ideas and it may be good to discuss them now.  Even if we have to wait some time for work on the next generation GNOME to begin in earnest, is this a good time to discuss some of these issues on this list?

The concept of making the main menus task-oreinted has long been discussed in theory but has never been applied in practice on any OS's environment.  

Could this be applied in a release in the near future?  Making the applications "ego-less," as the author calls it, would be a further step towards making developers think fo the end goals of the software and the tasks we users perform:

http://browserbookapp.sourceforge.net/topaz/


This person has come up with the idea of circular pop-up menus, reducing the amount of mouse movement, amongst otehr benefits.  I do not know if GTK currently supports this but it would be, I imagine, relatively easy to implelment floating palettes of this nature:

http://www.daimi.au.dk/~kamstrup/articles/G3-ideas.html

Do people believe these would be more usable?  

As an aside, I am personally not endeared by the mouse.  Recently, I have actually grown to love a rather unassuming yet ultimately very practical interface, that found in the Links shell browser.  I have found that this has one of the best keyboard driven systems available, being modal and thus avoiding the need for obscure key combinations using modifiers such as "Ctrl" and "Alt." Unlike vi, it does display visual menues after hitting the key to change mode (escape), thus making it easier for novices to grasp.  (Note that I am not criticising vi - I know that it is very efficient for experienced users and par tof the reason for little onscreen information was also the speed of machines and modems when working over Telnet in that period.)  Perhaps, though, GNOME could learn lessons from links and use a key to go into a command mode, rather than using modifier key combinations.  (The version of links I am using is 0.11.0, in FC5).

Back on topic, I believe that these Lazuli mock-ups also show great potential, particular with regard to the idea of using the Desktop as a space for Today's Items:

http://desplesdadotcom.nfshost.com/?p=75

Appointments, tasks, volume of new emails, weather reports, news headlines (via RSS), Messages-of-the-Day from SysAdmins and so forth could all be displayed here.

During the day, e.mail previews could also appear if this were built as a kind of sidebar,so the user would not have to constantly switch back to his or her email client application.  (Google Desktop's sidebar currently has such a feature on Windows that I, for one, have found is extremely convenient as it reduces the number of switches between applications.  As someone suffering from "e.mail deluge" at work, such a previewer enables me to read the conents of the message ata glance and determine if it is important or not.  If it is important, clicking ont eh mail allows the whole thing to slide out from the side, again without switching back to Outlook, which is mandatory at my firm :-(

Making all items drag-and-drop storable on the clipboard would also be a good step forward.


Here are a couple of other concept designs I have found.  I have nothing to comment on about these but I hope they provide food for thought for anyone who has not seen them.  As I am still very much an amateur in the field of usability, it would be great to hear the thoughts fromt he rest of you about these:

Hurley Topaz Interface Mock-Ups
http://gabriel.hurley.googlepages.com/userinterface

Lilburn Topaz Interface Mock-Ups
http://members.westnet.com.au/peter.lilburn/sl/tpz1.jpg


Cheers,

Sarah