Re: [Usability] cheese usability review

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 4 Jan 2008, daniel g. siegel wrote:

> Date: Fri, 04 Jan 2008 22:30:52 +0100
> From: daniel g. siegel <dgsiegel gmail com>
> To: "usability gnome org" <usability gnome org>
> Subject: [Usability] cheese usability review
>
> dear all,
>
> while the ui of cheese gets described as quite good by some and as
> pretty bad by others, i would like to discuss the ui and usability of
> cheese and even enhance it to be full HIG compatible. i am not a
> usability expert and the ui of cheese was done step by step without even
> thinking about people with handicaps or other usability features.
> therefore it would be very nice if some of you could post their opinion
> about cheese and what we could do better.

Been meaning to get on to you about that early on during the Google summer
of code but neglected to follow it up when I failed to get it to build
(could try harder).  I had only become familiar with Photobooth shortly
before you started Cheese and was very pleased to see someone trying to
bring the same kind of simply powerful, brilliantly-obvious-in-hindsight,
and effective idea like that to Gnome.

Clearly Cheese is inspired by Apple's Photobooth application so my first
question is what have you done differently and why?  As the developer of
Cheese you probably already know on some level what might be missing, with
a little nudge you will likely end up answering your own questions.

First thing first please please please revert to using a File menu.  I was
very dissapointed when I read the latest release notes and saw that change
had snuck in. There is ZERO benefit to the inconsistency of having it
labelled something else.  For those of us who use keyboard navigation it
can be quite annoying and it creates unnecessary work for translators.
(Putting the brand name "Cheese" front and centre might not be much fun
for translators, hard to know if the expression even makes sense in other
cultures, and it is wiser to avoid hardcoding the brand name, you never
know if you might want to change it later.)

I know the HIG has a mile-wide-exception that people claim encourages them
to ditch the file menu but it is not intended to encourage inconsistency
or shameless branding, it is there to describe task based applications
like for example games or a calculator which dont have the usual file
operations such as Open, Save, and Close/Quit.


I definitely want to try to compile Cheese again and play with it in
detail because I'm interested to see if you can really Keep It Simple and
avoid feature creep.  It is all too tempting to add more and more special
effects and video features, keeping it simple is a harder trick.

Keep up the good work.

-- 
Alan