[212] in Athena User Interface
Re: Usability testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dan Winship)
Wed Jun 21 12:27:37 2000
Message-Id: <200006211624.MAA21612@twelve-monkeys.helixcode.com>
To: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
Cc: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 21 Jun 2000 11:22:03 EDT."
<200006211522.LAA25094@w20-575-42.mit.edu>
Date: Wed, 21 Jun 2000 12:24:36 -0400
From: Dan Winship <danw@helixcode.com>
> - E.g. "Button-1" is much less intelligible than "Left mouse button"
The mouse capplet lets you remap the buttons to a "left handed"
configuration so that "Button 1" is the right mouse button. You could
argue that people who swap the buttons around like that can do the
math though, and there are probably millions of other places in gnome
that refer to the buttons as left/right anyway.
> - Is click-to-focus or point-to-focus more popular?
I think the discovery team agreed that UNIX has lost the battle and
click-to-focus is more popular. (Helix Code agreed this too. We ship
with click-to-focus by default.) Just make sure to advertise how to
change it. (Hint of the day!)
> - Tasklist is hard to read. Need to adjust sizing.
...
> - Should the panel be more than one row? (Window taskbar can be
> heightened just by dragging; this is convenient for cluttered
> desktops.)
...
> - Should the taskbar autohide?
I use a tiny panel with icons and a clock at the top of my screen, and
a large auto-hiding panel with the task list at the bottom. I think
having the tasklist on an autohiding panel works very well, and lets
you make it nice and big without worrying about it stealing lots of
screen real estate. YMMV.
> - Should the right-click popup menus onthe panel be diabled or
> synched?
Not sure what you mean here exactly. What needs syncing to what?
> - Should clicking on an icon in the tasklist iconify or raise?
You know that it does both by default, right? (If the window is
iconified, it uniconifies it, if it's uniconified but obscured, it
raises it, and if it's unobscured, it iconifies it.) So if you click
on the tasklist icon and it does the "wrong" thing, you just click it
again. Easy.
> - 1 with primarily Mac experience
1 is not a useful sample size, regardless of the relative size of the
"people with primarily Mac experience" population.
-- Dan
