[Usability] Some Small Suggestions for Evolution, Abiword and GNUmeric

[Sarah Berry <sberry grex cyberspace org>]

Dear GNOME Usability Community,

Thank you for your constructive feedback regarding my last suggestion.

I now have a few other small things I would like to raise with you:


1.  I would love Evolution to have a keyboard shortcut for the "Junk Mail" feature. 

2.  A sidebar, providing e.-mail previews, like that provided by Google Desktop on Windows.  (I do not know if the Beagle tool provides some such functionality; as a Fedora user, I have not had this installed.)

3.  In your office applications, such as Abiword and GNUmeric, I would like to see a non-modal, floating palette for all formating options.  Having used most WYSIWYG word processors over time, I personally found the Lotus WordPro offering to be by far the most usable.  Obviously this is subjective based solely on my own experience but there were a number of concrete reasons for this.

Using a traditional office tool, formating occurs via these steps:
a.  Select text or object to format;
b.  Move mouse to menu;
c.  Locate correct option from menu;
d.  Complete dialogue box (which may possibly provide a preview of changes);
e.  Confirm by clicking on "Ok."
To modify the options after confirmation, the whole process must be repeated.

Lotus, by contrast, streamlined this process greatly.  A floating palette dialogue box contained all formatting options in a number of tabs.  These included options for text, bpage settings (such as margins),  Iragraph settings (such as borders and indentations) and header, footer and picture formatting options.  The spreadsheet, presentation and database tools also used this system.

As it was non-modal, the palette could be left open whilst different portion of text were selected and formatted one after another.  All changes were pplied to the document in real time, thus making the software feel much more responsive and allowing the user to receive instantaneous feedback.  This shortened the user's learning curve, as they could see exactly what options did and gave them confidence to explore more of the tool's features.  Without the need to click "ok", "cancel" or the like, the dialogue box could remain on screen at all times.

Finally, as all options for formatting were contained in a series of tabs all within this one floating palette dialogue box, the user did not need to hunt for options, which cna interrupt the workflow.

As can be seen from these advantages, the approach used by Lotus ultimately resulted in a system that was more usable and efficient.

I would be interested in hearng the opinions of others who have used Lotus Wordpro or other parts of the "Smartsuite".

I hope that this can be employed in the GNOME office tools.

4.  One final usability issue I wish to raise pertains to saving graphics in web pages.  The right-click and "save as" method has never struck me as particularly intuitive.  A few days ago, I opened a number of thumbnails graphics out across different tabs.  I then had to go to each tab and successively right-click and save them.  This struck me as unintuitive and extremely tedious.  Could therebe an option to "save all graphics" on a site?  Secondly, if I have pages open across multiple tabs, could there be an option to "save all" open sites?  I have used Konqueror, Firefox and Epiphany and not found such an option in any of these.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

Cheers,

S. Berry