Re: Constructive Ideas for Improving Spacial Nautilus

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Fri, 2004-05-14 at 00:27, Brian Gosnell wrote:

> There are features that make this better, but people don't think to
> double middle click on a folder to close the parent.  It's not
> intuitive.  It's not something people try because they're not used to
> using their middle button for anything except scrolling windows.

I've always been tempted to run a little usability test to see if people
got on any better if the default behaviour was to close the parent
window, and they had to hold down Shift (or do the middle-click thing)
to keep it open :)  

I very much doubt that they would, especially if they weren't told the
secret.  But you never know: it's not all that different from how
multiple selection works, where each thing you select deselects
everything else unless you do something different to maintain the
previous selection.  (The difference of course is that multiple
selections are a comparatively rare requirement, whereas opening
multiple hierarchically-related windows probably isn't-- although I have
to say it is for me personally.)

> Navigating backwards through windows.  I've seen people go over a month
> without realizing there was a parent window button in the bottom left
> corner.

FWIW, I think the biggest problem here is that it looks like neither a
button nor a dropdown list, neither of which you'd normally expect to
see in a status bar anyway, so it just goes completely un-noticed.  So
even just adding the usual dropdown list 'arrow' could make a big
difference here IMHO.

> It would be nice, if when dragging a file from one window to another,
> the destination window would raise after a short delay.

Yep, I think there's a feature request open for this already somewhere.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            Java Desktop System Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems