Re: [Usability] Yelp Bookmarks Dialog

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Wed, 2011-02-16 at 14:57 -0500, Philip Ganchev wrote:
> On Fri, Feb 4, 2011 at 4:07 PM, Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org> wrote:
> > Hi folks,
> >
> > I'm working on Yelp's bookmarks dialog, and I'd like some
> > input. [...]

Just as a point of reference, my current git tree doesn't
have a dialog anymore. You can remove a bookmark to the
current page through a menu item. Also, the bookmark icon
in the location entry now toggles.

> > [...] You can't add a bookmark, short of going to a page
> > and bookmarking it. You can't edit or duplicate a bookmark.
> > And you can't reorder bookmarks.
> 
> What about renaming a bookmark and going to a bookmark ? Maybe you are
> suggesting it won't be possible to go to a bookmark from the dialog,
> only from the Bookmarks menu, while clicking on the bookmark name in
> the dialog will edit it?

The editor dialog was able to go to a bookmark by pressing
Enter. I wasn't sure where to put a button for that though.
There wasn't anything like that in the lists pattern.

As for renaming, help pages in Yelp have nice predictable
names, without all the "[MySite] Page Title -- MySite.com
(stuff a bunch of SEO keywords in the title)" crap you see
on the web. So I didn't bother pestering the user with
bookmark names.

> [...]
> > And thinking outside the pattern, should there even be a
> > bookmarks editor dialog at all? Or should Yelp just allow
> > you to remove a bookmark to the page you're looking at?
> 
> It might be better without an editor. It's 2 extra clicks for every
> bookmark removed -- activate bookmarks menu, select bookmark from the
> menu, select "remove" from the menu (or from the tool bar) -- compared
> to with the editor -- activate bookmarks menu (once), select Edit
> Bookmarks (once), select bookmark, press Remove, close editor (once).
> But also renaming a bookmark will have to be done by removing it and
> adding one with a new name.

Actually, in the somewhat rare case that a page title does
change, Yelp automatically updates the bookmark name every
time you visit the bookmarked page. No need to manually
rename or remove and re-add. It just does the right thing.
That's another reason not to deal with user renaming, as
then I'd have to keep track of which ones were explicitly
renamed so I don't clobber the name.

Yelp is a much more lightweight animal than, say, a web
browser. I'm trying to keep things very simple, designing
for users who really don't want to spend a lot of time
looking at help.

--
Shaun