Re: [Usability] Foobar Menu Layout

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

[Since I suppose I'll spend a lot of time talking about XD2 and our
design choices at GUADEC, I might as well start now.]

On Wed, 2003-06-04 at 06:44, Alan Horkan wrote:
> I expect that Microsoft Windows users would be more comfortable with
> Programs (because windows uses "Program Files").

That's part of it; partially it's just that (even after repeatedly
asking the usability guys in various forums) I still have no idea what
the distinction between applications and actions is. And part of it, of
course, is that it was very well recieved in XG1.4. [Anna may have more
detail on why that layout was chosen for XG1.4- I really don't know.]

> > Great to see the big menu icons back, but it's pretty scary to see the
> > sidebar image on the Programs menu. Yucky poo. :-)

>  This image also means that
> you cannot makes the menu items easier to hit by having them right against
> the extreme edge (Fitts Law agian).

That's incorrect; our menu panel has exactly as much Fitt's Law-ness as
the current GNOME head panel- i.e, the pixel exactly up against the edge
of the screen doesn't do anything and a couple pixels over it works as
expected. (This is a regression for us, since our 1.4 panel did it
right, but not from the community's build.)

> And the program menu contains "Favorites"!?!
> I hope they remembered to localise it, Microsoft didn't which is really
> annoying and culturally insensative for some of us.

It is localized, I'm pretty sure; it's also the only sensible thing
until menu editing works. [Even then, because of the current state of
menu editing, it pretty much sucks, but it's better than nothing.]
[Well, actually the ideal is a recently-used apps menu, but we ran out
of time to beat that into shape.]

> Shame Nat is using PPT instead of SXI (Star Office Impress/Presentation)
> but I can only hope that it is part of convincing people how good
> StarOffice is at dealing with Powerpoint Presentations.

Unfortunately, we're a business, not tech freedom evangelists (at least
not on paid time.) Our customers repeatedly complained that people using
star office were surprised when other people couldn't read their files.
So we fixed that problem by making our Open Office defaults to .doc,
.ppt, etc. I hope someday that can change but it can't right now.

Luis