[Usability] Me and Nautilus emblems

[Matthias Jordan <mjordan code-fu de>]

Hi, folks.

I'm new on this list and thought I could say "hello". I'm a computer
scientist, working in interactive information retrieval and trying
to find out how search interfaces can support users who engage in
different information-seeking actions. That means I'm much less into
tfidf than I am into cognitive models and user behavior.

GNOME-wise, I'm currently interested in the Nautilus emblems. What
is the status on this issue? I read in the archive that there was an
art team meeting where the issue came up but, as of Ubuntu 9.4, no
change to the emblems is apparent to me.

I'd love to help. One opportunity would be some of the user
experiments I'm going to conduct soon. It would be no problem to
include a few non-IR (i.e. emblem-related) questions to get some
feedback. A different way would be a qualitative user study to find
out how users use folders and how they would benefit from emblems
and which would be useful. As I'm not too keen on doing work that
others have already done, I'd like to get some feedback before I
begin with any research.

A student of mine recently completed a BA thesis on annotation (in
the context of digital libraries). He also wrote about (graphical)
tags and automatic annotations. The idea of these is to
automatically annotate items using some heuristics or rules. Other
programs (e.g. Eclipse) already do this. One could, e.g., annotate
directories that have working copies or repositories of
source-control systems with emblems for the respective system. E.g.
one could tag a directory that has a Mercurial repository with a
Mercurial icon.

Please note that the few extra questions in my experiments is a no
brainer, but an extra user study would take quite some time because
my main focus right now is getting my PhD.


Greetings

Matthias