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

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Jun 8, 2006, at 3:47 PM, Loïc Minier wrote:
> ...
> """
> 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).

Hardly surprising: a file search definitely isn't a "place". It's not 
an application either, but at least "Applications" looks vaguely like a 
Start menu.

> 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."

That problem will continue until Fedora begins using human-readable 
directory names (like GoboLinux, Mac OS, and Windows all do to varying 
extents).

> ...
> 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),

Again, they were right and the OS was wrong. The default should be to 
search everything you can access, just like in Web search engines, 
because (a) you are likely to be searching for programs, which usually 
aren't in your home folder, and (b) searching everything will usually 
be quicker (as you suggested later) than choosing a correct scope then 
searching within that.

> 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.

Fortunately the dialog doesn't use the inscrutable "/" terminology, but 
"File System" isn't much better, and the icon for it seems to be a 
harmonica. Unfortunately there isn't really any good name for 
"collection of obscurely-named things that has your files hidden in it 
somewhere, and your programs in it spread across several other places, 
but which can't be called your hard disk because it has your other 
drives hidden inside it too".

> 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).
> ...

This is a bug in that while the Find tool tells you "No files found", 
it does not mention what it was searching for, so there is no way to 
distinguish between a search that has finished with no results and one 
that hasn't started yet.

Thanks for your interesting report.

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