Re: [Usability]Re: Killing views [Was: Dealing with files in Gnome]

[Wesley Leggette <wleggette gate net>]

So does this mean that we should have "copy" be the default action, and
have "move" always be a modifier?

-Wesley

On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 04:38, Calum Benson wrote:
> On Thu, 2003-04-03 at 11:00, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> 
> > Correct, and that is why this behaviour should be made more consistent. I
> > remember a thread about this very subject some time ago, not sure if
> > anything ever came of it.
> 
> Funnily enough, I came across an old email about that from one of the
> Sun usability guys the other day too.  He wasn't quite so sure it was a
> good idea :)
> 
> > Back in '93 we were testing Drag and Drop between documents. The 
> > question was "what's the right behavior. Should a standard (no 
> > modifier keys) drag: (1) always move, (2) always copy, (3) depend 
> > upon the source and destination (like the Finder), or (4) something 
> > completely different?"
> > 
> > Many of the engineers wanted a clear, consistent "drag is always move 
> > unless you hold down a modifier key. They said let's get rid of the 
> > confusing behavior that the Finder has where a drag to a folder on 
> > the same volume is a move while a drag to another volume is a copy. 
> > We had long arguments about the relative merits, etc.
> > 
> > So to settle the issue we built a working application (OpenDoc of 
> > course) and had 20+ users come in to try out all the variations (in 
> > different order so we could eliminate bias, etc.) When testing the 
> > "drag is always a move" version I frequently saw this happen --
> > 
> > 1. The instructions told the user that we wanted them to create a new 
> > document that had a sailboat in it -- and they could find a sailboat 
> > in an existing document. The instructions told them to try 
> > drag-and-drop. The user would create the new document, open the 
> > existing document and drag the sailboat to the new document.
> > 
> > 2. The next bit of instruction had them add some more content to the 
> > new document and then to make a third document with the sailboat. 
> > Invariably when they got to this stage they would suddenly notice 
> > that the sailboat wasn't in the first document any more and be very 
> > confused. After playing around for a while they would figure out what 
> > had happened and then CLOSE THE FIRST DOCUMENT WITHOUT SAVING so they 
> > would get a revert action!
> > 
> > They had learned that they could always back out by not saving their changes.
> > 
> > We finally realized that the user expectation wasn't so simple as we 
> > imagined it. They wanted to MOVE their data around easily but never 
> > LOOSE data. If a second copy was made when they really only wanted 
> > one that was much better than ever loosing it because it was easy to 
> > delete the unwanted copy.
> 
> Cheeri,
> Calum.
-- 
Wesley Leggette <wleggette gate net>