[Nautilus-list] UI Design

[<mitch nuclear physics gatech edu>]

	The most noteable aspect of any desktop environment is how
intuitive it is. With this said, I believe Nautilus needs a bit of UI
redesign. Most users have no concept of the file system layout or how
hard disks, etc... work with a operating system. Users need a UI that
relates to the physical system. Take something simple like a vcr. The user
can see physically that a vcr tape can be inserted in the front and that
they have obvious options such as play, stop, eject, fast forward, and
rewind. However, a menu system could have been implemented that could even
have submenus. Doing something such as this would only lead to
confusion. Anyway, my point is that Nautilus will be how a nonexperienced
computer user will views his physical system and it will be the tool for
controling it. Since the physical system will be all they really know,
Nautilus should play on that a bit more. Ex. The Nautilus window should
display at all times obvious icons in some type of menu bar for hard
drives mounted, cdroms, floppys, zip disks,local network(smb/network
neighborhood), etc.... A user ought to be
able to see these at all times. Then that user can easily relate that to
their physical hardware and have a bit more comfort with what's going
on. For removable disks like cdroms, floppys, etc... there should be a
icon that changes dynamically. A icon for when there is something in the
drive mounted and a icon for when there is nothing in the drive. Each icon
should also open the contents of that drive when clicked and it should be
capable of dnd so that a user could drag a file onto the floppy icon. A
could place for this menu bar could be on the far right parallel with the
tree or up top. I also believe that the whole web browser aspects should
be taken out completely. As of now, the Nautilus UI seems to be clutered
with unintuitive and confusing navigation. My mother or father ought to be
able to sit down, open a obnoxious looking (standing out) icon of some
sort on the desktop that screams out click me to use this computer. Once
opened, it should be obvious how to navigate between disks, local network,
etc..... Anyway, any thoughts on this?