Re: Arlo, a little QA comment regarding your interview withlinux.com

[John Sullivan <sullivan eazel com>]

Kevin Cullis wrote:

<stuff deleted>

> Agreed, not everything belongs under the 80/20 rule, but looking at the
> 80/20 rule does help in identifying features which belong closer to the
> user and those that do not.
>
> For example, in GNOME in the File Manager, in order to show the hidden
> files I have to go to the settings menu and select preferences and then
> select the hidden files option.  While I normally don't have the show
> hidden files selected, from a user's perspective of time, it would be
> nice to have this in the menu itself rather than bringing up a dialog
> box.

This is a good case to think about for the tradeoffs involved.

It is obviously faster for a user to toggle the display of "hidden" files via a
menu item than to set the preference inside a dialog box, possibly behind a tab
or section heading inside a dialog box.

On the other hand, in theory anyway, hidden files are hidden for a reason -- they
aren't intended for users to futz with. So making it really easy to display them
is likely to lead to some users getting into trouble by messing with them when
they shouldn't.

Also, if you provide the menu in the menu bar, then you have to decide whether
choosing that menu affects only the current window or all file manager windows.
There are arguments each way, which means whichever way you choose will seem
wrong to some people, and will probably cause usability issues for some people.

Also, every menu item adds a little bit of complexity to the menus. If the
program has 200 menu items, it is much harder to deal with than a program with 50
menu items. It's harder to remember where things are, it's harder to find the
thing you're looking for, it's harder to come up to speed on which features are
important. Sure, any given menu item seems like it isn't adding much complexity,
but you have to think about this in terms of the big picture too -- you have to
fit this decision into the context of all the other potential such decisions; you
can't think of it only in isolation.

So (like everything), it's a tradeoff. I'm not sure what the "right" answer is
for this particular case for Nautilus. I just wanted to point out that even
apparently simple decisions like this one are rarely simple.

John