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

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

Anna Marie Dirks <anna ximian com> writes: 
> 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
> 

How would you compare/contrast with:
  http://www242.pair.com/nilsp/nils/panel/menus.html

I sort of had the impression this had already gone through usability@
and we had some sort of decision in place? I didn't follow whatever
discussions there were though, so I don't know for sure.

> Please review it, and let me know what you think.

You asked. ;-) I'll just go on about Settings some more since I'm
obsessed with it.

BTW, pasting your lists from Gnumeric I discovered that Gnumeric 1.0.5
copy-and-paste is _broken_ someone please hit Jody with the
http://www.freedesktop.org/standards/clipboards.txt clue-bat. ;-)

You still have 33 or so settings dialogs, I'd go after them as follows:

About myself       
Change password   ---> all in "about me", minus 2 items
Login Photo

Accessibility

Language/Spell checking** ---> Put it in the apps where it applies,
                               minus 1

Default Editor ---> Put it in "file handlers", i.e. 
                    one capplet for how you edit/open/view each kind
                    of file. minus 1
Screensaver
Background

Metatheme              ---> The word "Metatheme" should never appear
                            in a menu ;-) Anyhow, merge with below
                            theme thingy, minus 1
Desktop Theme Selector  

Fonts**
Panel   ---> Should not exist, the right click approach is fine, 
             plus the dialog doesn't contain anything useful
             anyway. minus 1
Toolbars and Menus ---> Crackrock dialog, kill it, minus 1
Window Manager ---> Should not be called "Window Manager", and will
                    only contain "focus mode" and maybe a couple other
                    checkboxes maximum. Think about where we could put
                    it - there must be somewhere.
 
Camera ---> What do you actually configure about a camera? mine has no
            options of interest. minus 1
Keyboard
Mouse
Pilot (Link and Conduits) ---> what's a link or conduit ;-) should be
                               titled "Palm Pilot" IMO
Printer Config (RH) ---> Note that this configures things for all
                         users, while Keyboard/Mouse are personal 
                         preferences. Should they be in the same menu?
                         This app has UI troubles btw.
 
Scanner ---> Can't it be merged with camera if we need either one? 
             If these two panels are just "tell the system what model 
             you have" then can't we have a single Hardware capplet 
             where you fill in the model of all your hardware?

HTML behavior stuff** ---> Assuming this is "HTML viewer" - all these
                            could just go in Evolution, no other app
                            uses the viewer - in the global menu
                            there's not enough context that I know
                            what it's for anyway. I probably expect it
                            to affect Galeon not Evolution... As an
                            aside the Keybindings tab can just go in a
                            general Keybindings dialog.

Internet Config Wizard (RH) ---> Shouldn't be a menu item, just part
                                 of Network Config. Minus 1.
Network Config (RH) ---> Item should be "Network" or "Networking" no "Config"
Networking (XST) ---> Don't want both this and RH, pick one, minus 1
                      of them
Proxies  ---> Merge with Networking, minus 1
Shares (XST) ---> (Do it from Nautilus ideally, but OK for now)
Boot (XST) ---> Server/advanced/admin feature, should go elsewhere, minus 1
Disks (XST) ---> Very advanced server/admin feature, also elsewhere, minus 1
Memory (XST) ---> Don't know what this does but I'm sure I don't want
                  to configure my memory, I've never done so. ;-) minus 1
Users (XST) ---> server/admin tool, elsewhere, minus 1
Date/Time (XST) ---> This one is a common end user need but affects
                      all users systemwide, tricky.

Mime Types               ---> Pretty sure Mime Types and File Types
                              shouldn't be different, minus 1
File Types and Programs 

Legacy Apps ---> Dunno what this does, hopefully minus 1


I might add:
 Keybindings + 1 (of course this could be considered crack, would be 
                  on XP or OSX, but basically required on UNIX)
 Hardware    + 1 (only to absorb scanner/camera/palmpilot if they are
                  just "tell system what kind of device"; if they 
                  have something more then they may not be absorbable)
 CD         + 1

So many items potentially removable. Something like this remains:

About Myself (or My Information or Personal Details or whatever)
Accessibility
Screensaver
Background
Appearance/Colors/Theme
Fonts
Window Behavior/Window Manager
Keyboard
Keybindings
Mouse
Palm Pilot
CD
Networking
File Sharing
Date and Time
File Types and Programs
Printing

Plus admin tools that affect the whole system and do 
scary things users don't understand:

Disk Partitioning
User Management
Boot Loader

It's likely for things like File Sharing, Networking, Printing there
should be the EZ end user tool and the advanced
I-have-100-printers-and-6-ethernet-cards tool.

Anyway, basic point is, don't limit yourself to arranging existing
items - let's feel free to blow away, merge, modify, even add, tools
so that we end up with something sensible. Playing with the categories
seems like a band-aid to me, the problem is too many things to start
with. 

I'm especially concerned by things like the HTML capplets which to me
seem like app prefs moved into a global space; I don't see a
theoretical bound on the number of prefs dialogs if we start down that
road. What app pref couldn't theoretically be shared with another
similar app? Given that most users use only a few apps, are we gaining
them much benefit by sharing these dialogs? Enough benefit to outweigh
the cost of the clutter? I'd at least like to limit prefs dialogs like
this to cases where the pref in question is actually in practice used
by a number of apps that don't overlap functionally (i.e. sharing
prefs among all web browsers is useless, users will only be using one
browser).

I'd be interested in ideas on whether we can have a visible place to
choose tasks such as "Change Password", "Change Login Photo",
etc. without having to have these as separate control panels.

i.e. what if we had a Tasks menu... Mandrake has this in latest.
Putting each task in its own dialog seems suboptimal.

The questions I have seem really hard to answer via user tests, since 
creating the two things to be compared means rearranging/writing
various dialogs, vs. just moving menu items. :-/

Rambling onward to the overall menus... I like the idea of Help in the
menu panel. To me Actions is kind of nicer than Desktop (desktop is so
overloaded).

I don't like "Non-gnome apps (KDE et al)" - basically I think we
should either merge the KDE apps into the main menus or not display
them at all. Users don't care about KDE vs. GNOME.

Why "addressbook" and "calendar" as folders? Why would users want to
see 3 or 4 options for these? Why not just one address book and one
calendar, under "applications", and ignore the other ones?

I like the way Nils avoids names like "gFTP" and "EOG" in favor of 
"FTP client" or "Image Viewer"

It's an interesting idea to put some items such as Emacs and Red Hat
Network in multiple submenus. Seems useful.

Something like xdvi is really obscure and special-purpose, you have to
use TeX from the command line anyhow right, do we need it in the menus?

I bet a lot more of the individual apps can be killed from the menus,
e.g. having both EOG and gqview seems pointless, etc. etc.


One clear outcome of the above is that when planning the menus and
capplets the XST or Red Hat config tools need to be considered.
Something we promised to discuss post-2.0.

Havoc