Re: [Usability] merging applets

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Aug 13, 2006, at 5:29 AM, Michael R. Head wrote:
> On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 12:36 +0200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > Efficiency is only one aspect of usability, and there might be other
> > reasons to keep using separate applets (ability to show multiple
> > categories simultaneously? substantially different ideal window
> > widths? ease of extension?), but none that I can think of stand out 
> > as being particularly important.
>
> Yeah, and GOMS analyses, while great at measuring maximum UI efficiency
> for expert users

Did you miss the part where I was including the number of mistakes? :-)

> should be at best a secondary tool for designers, IMHO. The best thing 
> (as always) is to do a study with a selection of target users.

User studies would be important to measure learnability and 
satisfaction. They probably wouldn't give useful information about 
efficiency or memorability, unless they lasted for for weeks or months.

> To put it another way, if browser mode is harder to comprehend for 
> file management, why is it good for control panels?
> ...

Because with file management, the number of items in a group changes 
more often, wanting to view more than one set of stuff at once is much 
more common, and dragging items from one group to another is the most 
obvious way to move or copy them.

To put it another way, browse mode turns file moving and copying into 
an expert-only feature. (Experts can learn how "Cut", "Copy", and 
"Paste" have inconsistent meanings between file manager windows and 
document windows.)

--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/