Re: [Usability] Copy/double click feedback

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt myrealbox com>]

On Sep 24, 2007, at 6:19 AM, lorenzo wrote:
> ...
> The first one concerns the copy operation. This operation provides no
> feedback at all to user. You cannot know if you pressed correctly the 
> keyboard shortcut, if the object can be copied and so on.

One way to fix this would be for copied items to visibly fly into a 
clipboard applet in the panel, in the same way as minimized windows fly 
into their button in the window list. The same effect would work for 
cut items, with the difference that the original would disappear.

> ...
> The second one is about double click.
> You cannot know if you did the two clicks or a double-click. If you
> are too slow you just stay there staring at the selected icon. This is
> sometime a problem for non-expert users.
>
> A tipical scenario is application launch from desktop icon: you cannot
> know if the app is starting so the app has to provide a splash screen
> to give feedback to the user when the real problem is the double click
> operation (a splash screen is of course useful for very long
> startups).
> ...

For opening documents or applications, double-click was originally 
intended only as a shortcut for selecting the item and then choosing 
"File" > "Open", but the shortcut quickly became the most well-known 
interface. (The infamous action of dragging disks to the Trash is 
another example of something that was originally intended only as a 
shortcut.)

One way of providing feedback would be to animate the icon that was 
double-clicked on. Denis Washington has recently implemented this for 
gnome-panel <http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=479562>, but 
there's no reason it shouldn't work for Nautilus too.

Cheers
--
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/