Re: Preferences [Was: a whole lot of other things, too]

[Frédéric Crozat <fcrozat mandrakesoft com>]

Le sam 27/04/2002 à 01:07, Anna Marie Dirks a écrit :
> On the subject of preferences (and in turn, of menus), I have done quite
> a bit of research and have arrived at a proposal for reordering the
> Gnome2 preferences/settings and menus. 
> 
> To begin with, please turn your attention to the following spreadsheet,
> which compares the organization of preferences and settings in several
> different systems, including KDE, Windows XP, and OSX. 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/comparison.gnumeric
>      
> I did this comparison to see what terms and groupings other systems are
> using-- which provides a) a picture of what people new to gnome will be
> familiar with, and b) a set of different groupings to borrow from. 
> 
> To give you with a more concrete sense of how these are organized, I
> have screenshots of each system in the directories below: 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/windowsxp/
> 
>     (Note that they allow their users the option of using a task-based
>     approach.) 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/kde/
>     
>     (The screenshots in the "controlcenter" subdirectory are meant to
>     demonstrate the sheer power and friendliness of the three different
>     control center tabs (Index, Search, Help). Ah, to have something
>     that useful. 
> 
>     The screenshots in the "preferences" subdirectory detail the
>     organization of each of the preference submenus.) 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/macosx/
> 
>     (This is a reprint of Jeff's screenshot from earlier this week, put
>     in a handy-dandy place.) 
> 
> Then, to remind you of where we are coming from, I have some screenshots
> of the gnome1.4 menus (both from a standard Debian installation and also
> a set of ximian-ized menus). 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/gnome14/
> 
> So. What is the problem with the current Gnome2 menus and preferences?
> 
>         1. As Havoc pointed out in an earlier message in this thread,
>            they are too many levels deep (ie, more than two). 
>         2. They bear almost no resemblance to the gnome1.4 menus (making
>            upgrading a PITA). I am not saying they should be identical,
>            but trying to retain some of the good things about the
>            gnome1.4 menus would make the new ones easier to learn to
>            use.
>         3. Some of them contain entirely too many items. For instance,
>            look at my *35 item long* system tools menu: 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/system-tools.png
> 
> Items highlighted in yellow are settings/controls and don't belong in
> that menu, items highlighted in blue are either duplicates of other
> items, or are deprecated. Both of these groups should be removed from
> this menu. 
> 
> The applications menu suffers from a similar problem: 
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~anna/gnome2menus/applications-applications.png
> 
> Again, items in yellow are settings which don't belong in this menu. 
> 
> Finding settings all over the place in my menus led me to wonder why, if
> all the other systems I investigated provided a centralized place for
> these settings, Gnome2 should be different. Taking the sets of
> settings/controls from these two menus, and the list of preferences from
> the "desktop preferences" menu, I set out to organize them with the
> following goals in mind. 
> 
> Preferences/Settings should be organized into groups which:
> 
>         1. Are not more than two levels deep 
>         2. Do not contain more than 10 menu items 
>         3. Use terminology which is common between the systems I
>            investigated (including gnome 1.4) 
> 
> This turned out to be pretty easy, so I looked at all of the stuff left
> in my menus, and ordered it too, using the same criteria. Therefore, 
> finally, below is my proposal for how the gnome2 menus, and settings
> should be organized.
> 
>     http://primates.ximian.com/~gnome2menus/my-proposal.gnumeric
> 
> Please review it, and let me know what you think. If there is some
> interest in this approach (and if it isn't way too horribly late for
> such a change), then I would be happy to keep working on it, in the form 
> of usability tests or a patch. 

Just to give another example of menu structure, here is menu structure
we use at Mandrakesoft :

http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/howtos/mdk-rpm/mdk-menu-structure.html

We are still not very happy on two items in this structure :
-we have sometime too much depth (in Applications)
-Configuration/Other is not explicit at all..

I hope this will help you..

-- 
Frédéric Crozat
MandrakeSoft