[210] in Athena User Interface
Re: Usability testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Wed Jun 21 12:04:11 2000
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
From: tb@MIT.EDU (Thomas Bushnell, BSG)
Date: 21 Jun 2000 12:04:03 -0400
In-Reply-To: "Christopher D. Beland"'s message of "Wed, 21 Jun 2000 11:22:03 -0400"
Message-ID: <u1hk8fjc970.fsf@pusey.mit.edu>
Almost all of these I think are great suggested improvements; I'm only
commenting on the small number I don't understand or I'm not sure about.
"Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU> writes:
> - Right-click to get pulldown menu is not obvious enough; add button
> instead. Make it stay on top for very narrow windows, so they can
> be closed, minimized, maximized, etc. intuitively.
Which pulldown menu for which application?
> - Hard to move transient windows (i.e. zwgc) - decorate by default.
I tend to disagree here; I think zephyrgrams should be not decorated,
or at least, not with titlebars. Maybe frames that you can grab, but
not heavyweight title bars. (Of course M-drag will also work).
> - Some iffy survey results came back on what people want Athena to
> look like. 44% said Unix, 31% said Windows, and 7% said Mac. More
> reliable numbers give 40%, 80%, and 25%, respectively, on
> familiarity with interface.
AFAICT, "More reliable" means "more what Beland wants". At least, can
you say what makes you think numbers B are more reliable than numbers A?
> This, along with anecdotal evidence, makes me suspect that there
> might be some amount of demand for Windows and Mac look-alike
> themes, which we should be able to make available by just making
> sure they're installed and don't break?
There is already a Windows look-alike for gtk; it's called
"Redmond95". No matter how much it would be a good idea, we must not
call it "Windows" or we run risk of trademark problems, and M$ is
nasty about that.
I don't know if there is a Mac look alike for gtk or either for
Sawmill. I would be surprised if there are not. If cannot find ones,
I think it's pretty low priority to write ones; again, "n% prefer the
windows interface" does not say anything about which things they
prefer; the things that themes configure may be utterly irrelevant (as
long as they can find the buttons at the top of the window, which yak
is being very careful with).
> - What keyboard shortcuts for Sawfish should we enable by default?
Probably all the default sawfish ones.
> - Is click-to-focus or point-to-focus more popular?
Muaaa haaa haaa.
> - Should the panel be more than one row? (Window taskbar can be
> heightened just by dragging; this is convenient for cluttered
> desktops.)
gnome-panel doesn't really support that IIUC, but you can have N
panels.
> - Should the taskbar autohide?
No, that's confusing. There is a feature users can enable; we might
want to suggest it.
> - Should the taskbar have arrows on the hide buttons?
Yes.
> - Should the right-click popup menus onthe panel be diabled or
> synched?
What is "synched"? Certainly they shouldn't be disabled.
