Re: [Nautilus-list] Nautilus user testing at MIT

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Thu, Jan 04, 2001 at 08:43:28AM -0800 or thereabouts, John Sullivan wrote:
> on 1/3/01 3:26 AM, Rebecca Schulman at rebecka eazel com wrote:
[quoting someone else]
> >Eventually the dither around
> > and
> > find an editor.  Today, they found it in the left panel of the Nautilus
> > window (hadn't knoticed that before), but it isn't obvious.  The
> > Windows/Mac intuition is that if you double click on a text document, it
> > opens in an editor.
> 
> I can't help but gripe about this misuse of the word "intuition". It's true
> that Nautilus does not behave exactly like Windows or Mac in that by default
> you view documents in Nautilus and have to take a different step to open
> them in external applications. But this has nothing to do with "intuition",
> unless you cheapen "intuition" to mean simply "expectation based on using
> somewhat similar programs in the past". If you follow that route, then you
> start calling everything new "non-intuitive" because it's not exactly like
> its predecessors.

Yes, yes, yes!

For a variety of reasons, I have never used Windows. I get _really_
confused with certain apps in X, and 90% of the time, I discover that
they're cloning a Windows app. Everyone else in the world appears to
have used Windows and finds it perfectly obvious and intuitive with
those apps. And I feel very silly. 

The same for key-bindings. I was stuck with a (lovely) little terminal
that did text but not X for some years and got very familiar with the
bash shell and some of its defaults. And then I got X and found they
did rather different things if I absent-mindedly typed them at random
X-apps... 

I once lurked on gnome-gui-list (year or two ago). And everyone had
this terrible habit of referring to "like Mac does it" or "the Next
way" or used different words from different OSes without making it
clear which they meant. Having whipped through a number of window
managers in succession, I discovered that "workspace", "desktop",
"virtual desktop" and a few other things meant different things in
different window managers, let alone across OS. I once chatted about
a root window to someone on IRC for ten minutes before discovering
they thought I meant "a window I am su'd to root in". (Logical, from
their point of view.) 

I came to the conclusion that "I consider this intuitive" meant
"It behaves as did app X on OS Y, and that combination was the
first one I became used to".

Telsa