[Usability] Re: Killing Views Part 2 - The return of the Usabilty study



Hi Mark -

I am also in favor of your proposal because I too find the nautilus as
both file manager/universal viewer concept confusing...

I do however think three things need to happen first before we can
really consider doing this right:

1) Nautilus needs to have the possibility of two different applications
associated with each file type. The first would be a viewer and the
second would be an editor. For things like web pages or images, this is
key.

2) Mimetypes/filetype handlers configuration needs to be fixed and
stabilized.

3) Major GNOME applications need to build into their architecture the
ability to use existing instances when available. This is needed for
speed's sake or at least the appearance of speed's sake. Users shouldn't
have to start up a whole new instance of EOG just to view an image when
EOG is already running. Likewise for things like Gimp, AbiWord, etc. I
believe gEdit and Galeon (Epi too? je ne sais pas) already have this
functionality.

But yes, I"m definitely all for it, but I think it's not worth it until
we can get the above done as well.

-jag

On Fri, 2003-05-30 at 16:08, Mark Finlay wrote:
> We recently had a discussion about killing nautilus internal file
> views. And it was one of those issues that I wished I had some
> usability statistics to back it up.
> 
> Today I've been reading the usability review that sun did of
> Gnome 1.2 and came accross this page:
> http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/ut1_report/file_management.html
> 
> Users were confused by the read only view of a text file and 
> said things like:
> "I was expecting a word processing app to open [the file]...weird."
> "I was confused when the text file opened in a browser type thing."
> 
> The sun reccomendation was to make it more clear that the file is
> read only, but I would say that it makes more sense to remove the
> internal viewing of files in nautilus all together, now that nautilus is
> no longer used as a web browser.
> 
> There is no real benefit to viewing a text file or image in nautilus
> AFAICT, but there are definately drawbacks, and as that usability
> study shows, it causes user frustration and confusion.
> 
> I don't want to start another holy war. But I would love to get a
> response from the nautilus maints for or against this. The rest of us
> can argue to we go blue in the face, but if the maints aren't listening
> then there is no point.
> 
> Thanks for you time,
> 
> -- 
> Mark Finlay <sisob eircom net>
-- 
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Joshua Adam Ginsberg           Cellphone: 970.749.8530
Rice University '02            Email: joshg myrealbox com
St. Mark's School of Texas '98
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