[651] in Athena User Interface
Are we sending the Eazel usability concerns in?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Thu Jan 25 18:30:48 2001
Message-ID: <8uQ=QYtz0001EBBfZx@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 25 Jan 2001 23:30:44 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
I know that we're ramping up to report bugs upstream to the various
GNOME development teams. In reading the analysis of the usability
testing, however, I've come to believe it would be good if we could
get some information to Eazel about Nautilus' usability:
I would VERY MUCH like to see a note go to the Eazel folks saying
something like:
We have been performing formal usability testing on Nautilus in our
school-wide computing environment, and we have identified a number of
issues (this is just a reformatting of what was published on the
usability analysis page):
When the file manager was on the task bar and labeled File Manager,
most participants could do this. However, since the file manager
window doesn't actually open, once the lbackground changed and the
little house appeared in the left hand corner they were less sure
what to do and most had to be prompted to try opening the house.
The lack of any cue that the file manager was opening (hourglass,
clock,...) caused a proliferation of file manager windows once they
found the correct thing to click to open the file manager window.
Questions arose about single or double clicking. Testers not sure
which to do.
Testers tried to drag file to the desktop. When that didn't work
they began to look for a copy command.
Testers had trouble with the instruction to Copy. Several looked for
a Copy command under the Edit menu in the File Manager.
Since the default window does not have the tree open, several
testers opened a second file manager and dragged from one window to
the other.
