[Usability] search is not easy to find aka "a few minutes with gnome virgins"

[Loïc Minier <lool+gnome via ecp fr>]

        Hi,

Michael Gilbert (michael.s.gilbert -at- gmail.com) explained his
experience when introducing GNOME to people otherwise running Windows in
Debian bug http://bugs.debian.org/371882:
"""
at work the other day a couple windows-locked coworkers of mine were
attempting to use a fedora system.  they were attempting to figure out
if a particular application was available on the system.  they had no
idea where to go to do a file search (they expected it to be in the
start menu, but gave up after they found it wasn't under applications).
so then they tried nautilus, but couldn't figure out where to go.  they
dropped down to / where they were even more dumbfounded.  a comment was
"what are all these  directories and how am i supposed to find anything
in this mess."  i suggested looking in /usr/local and /opt but both came
up empty.

i suggested that they try the search under the gnome places menu, at
which point they were able to find some similarity to their
expectations.  at first they used the defaults and only searched in
their home directory (inadvertently assuming that the file must not be
on the disk even though their search path was too limited), at which
point i said you should search from the / directory.  they opened the
gnome file selector, and could not figure out how to pick / (in fact
they didn't understand the concept of /, or how it relates to something
like c:).  i also didn't know how to select / directly from the gnome
file selector this, but eventually figured out if you select the topmost
directory breakout at the top of the file selector  that you will get /
as your selection.  this is very non-obvious and needs to be fixed.  so
they tried their search, which completed *way* too fast for their
expectations (likely because they are used to windows searches taking
significant time to search an entire disk because file lists are not
cached as scrollkeeper does).  so i did a "find / | grep fname" which
also came up empty to indicate to them that indeed the file they were
looking for was not on the system.

at one point another comment was "it seems like they do things
differently just to be different," referring to the gnome desktop in
general vs windows.

anyway, hope you can find some useful bits from the mindset virgin gnome
users.  need more details?  just ask.
"""

 I initially tried opening a discussion at
 <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=344267>, but was suggested
 that this list would be a better place.

 (Please keep 371882 bdo in copy and add 371882-submitter bdo if you
 want to copy Michael Gilbert.)

   Bye,
-- 
Loïc Minier <lool dooz org>