Re: [Usability] Copy/double click feedback

["Raphael Bosshard" <raphael bosshard gmail com>]

Not only is the discoverability of the double-click almost zero, it is
also very difficult to learn.

Quite some of the people I work with (middle-aged, in front of the
computer for the first time) have great difficulties to handle the
double click correctly. Most of the time it's because they don't click
fast enough. At other times they move the mouse between the two
clicks. Double-clicking is something that needs a lot of training.

And then there is another issue; the double-click is amazingly
inconsistent with the rest of the desktop. How do you explain when to
double-click and when not to? I have quite some "pupils" that acquired
the habit of simply double-clicking everything (once they got used to
it) just to be sure.

It's a mess, really. And that activate-on-single-click thingy doesn't
work all to good either, at least for me. I never used it in a
training session, because I tend to activate / "open" files and
folders by accident with this setting. I don't know how new users
would do, to be fair.

On 9/24/07, Alexey Rusakov <ktirf altlinux org> wrote:
> On Sun, 23 Sep 2007 20:19:28 +0200
> lorenzo wrote:
>
> > recently I noticed what I consider a couple UI defect present on all OS I know.
> > Both are about providing user feedback.
> >
> > The first one concerns the copy operation. This operation provides no
> > feedback at all to user.
> > You cannot know if you pressed correctly the keyboard shortcut, if the
> > object can be copied and so on.
> > I often prefer to use a cut followed by a paste/undo to be sure of the
> > operation.
> > The system should provide some feedback for this: the selected part
> > could blink a couple of times and for the failure of the operation a
> > red border could blink, or something like that.
> This is a really good idea. It's been numerous times when I pressed Ctrl-C
> several times as if to make sure I have really copied a piece of text. I'd
> love to see such thing in GTK+.
>
> > The second one is about double click.
> > You cannot know if you did the two clicks or a double-click. If you
> > are too slow you just stay there staring at the selected icon. This is
> > sometime a problem for non-expert users.
> Double-click is not a good input action anyway, since its discoverability
> is almost zero. Concerning applications startup - there is a
> startup-notification exactly to notify a user that (s)he has just
> initiated an application startup :)
>
> --
>   Alexey "Ktirf" Rusakov
>   GNOME Project
>   ALT Linux Team
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