Re: [Usability] Cascading Menus, Context Menus, and Moving Files

[Thorsten Wilms <t_w_ freenet de>]

On Sat, May 19, 2007 at 01:25:00PM -0400, Jacob Beauregard wrote:

> 1. She was confused about what the context menus were referring to. One 
> solution would be to give context menus a header as to what they are 
> referring to. KDE does this for many panel applets and the system tray 
> already, but nothing else. GNOME doesn't have any similar behavior. It could 
> also be considered whether sub-headers would be useful, but at this point I'm 
> only recommending a header that states what the context menu is for.

So right-click single file: context menu header contains filename?
The names can't be listed for multiple selected files (it could be 20, 200, 
2000). Just use "Selection" as header?
 
> 2. When I was trying to show her how to copy/cut/paste multiple files at the 
> same time, she continuously made the error of right clicking on whitespace 
> and therefore lost the selection she had made. Considering how many files she 
> was copying, this wasted a lot of time. I wouldn't immediately be able to 
> think of a solution for this.

My first impulse was: why does right-clicking on white space clear the 
selection, it should not do that. But the context menu always works on 
the selection ...

Maybe the target areas are too small or just not obvious enough?


> 3. When she tried dragging photos into a folder, the size of the thumbnail 
> made it impossible to see whether or not the folder was highlighted. I would 
> categorize this as a bug, and I wouldn't know if its fixed because I don't 
> know if Ubuntu, the distribution that I use for her computer, has the latest 
> GNOME packages.

Ah yes, this one has been bugging me, too.


> I can say though, it would have been beneficial for there to have been a 
> visual cue to whether or not the folder was empty, as the folder she was 
> moving to the trash was quite similarly named to another folder.

Agreed. I tend to feel uneasy about deleting folders that should be empty :)


> 5. When getting the message that moving files to a folder would overwrite 
> already existing files, she didn't know what to do. If I hadn't told her to 
> say skip and rename the files, she would have overwritten the files with the 
> same name. This presents a problem with recoverability in moving files. I 
> would suggest possibly making a section in the trash for files that were 
> overwritten from the clipboard and from drag & drop behavior.

This would be no problem at all if filenames in a folder wouldn't have to 
be unique. It happened that I renamed images just so they could exist in 
one folder, not caring one bit about the actual filenames otherwise.


> The other problem with the overwrite dialog. It does not guide the user 
> through what they can do to move the file successfully. The user is presented 
> with: Skip All, Replace All, Skip, Replace. Even worse, the user is presented 
> with the question in BOLD, "Do you want to replace it?" which may have lead 
> her to click "Replace" and permanently lose a large number of her photos. The 
> mentioning of overwriting the contents, even if she knew what that meant, 
> wasn't in bold.

> I would suggest displaying thumbnails for both files in the dialog that the 
> user can open so that the user can see the difference between the files. I 
> would also STRONGLY suggest giving the option to rename the file. This option 
> should be failsafe, as it should not allow the user to choose another 
> filename that already exists, and should inform them if they do so.
> 
> Another option would be to automatically rename all files, such that on a 
> collision with 00002.jpg, it will just name the file 00002_2.jpg, and on 
> collision 00003.jpg, it will just name the file 00003_2.jpg.

I mean to remember that at least one of Gthumb and GQView show thumbnails, 
date, size and allow overwriting, skipping, renaming. Might be that renaming 
even defaults to a scheme like yours.


-- 
Thorsten Wilms

Thorwil's Design for Free Software:
http://thorwil.wordpress.com