[804] in Athena User Interface
Gnome-Athena usability re-assessment
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Sat Jun 23 00:02:20 2001
Message-Id: <200106230402.AAA31983@whack-a-mole.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
cc: sbjones@MIT.EDU, jlittell@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2001 00:02:14 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
So Abby suggested to me the other day that it might be useful to get
the braintrust together to re-evaluate the Gnome-Athena user interface
(in terms of usability) now that it's almost ready to go to release.
A lot of changes have been made since we originally did usability
testing, including the removal of Nautilus, which was our biggest
source of issues.
In any case, I've pulled together a list of usability-related issues
that I've personally been concerned about, which we could dispatch
decisively one way or the other, and prioritize things we wanted done.
Since more and more people are running Athena 9.0 every day, we are
already getting good feedback. However, it would probably be useful
to watch some incoming freshmen try to use the system for the first
time, come August. It would be easy enough to do that just by sitting
in W20 on the day all their Athena accounts go active, and ask random
people if they wouldn't mind if someone from I/S looked over their
shoulder. 8) But we could talk about that sort of thing, too, in a
meeting.
Speaking of such things, would a Thursday afternoon meeting be good
for those people who would be interested in participating? Maybe
around 2-ish?
To get things rolling, then, here's my list. Feel free to add things
you'd like to talk about. (Also feel free to suggest a different way
of going about doing this; I'm just trying to go with the flow. 8)
-B.
P.S. - There are 9.0 machines available for experiementation in W92's
test cluster, or an N42 machine or two could be converted if need be.
---
- Should we enable splashscreen feedback for launchers and menu
items? If so, should it be for all programs, only those that start
slowly on fast machines, or some other subset? (See
aui[798]-[802].)
- Should (i)nfo menu items open a new browser window for the user if
they have already have one open, or should they reuse an existing
window? (See testers[4777].)
- Should the following programs be made available, either in a locker
or in the release:
- gMix (gnome-audio)
- gtcd (gnome-audio)
- gEdit
(See aui[763].)
- The broken link from the gnome-help-browser intro page (i.e. the
missing Gnome Users' Guide, which is very hard to make work on
Athena natively) can by fixed by repointing the broken link in
/usr/athena/share/gnome/help/help-browser/C/default.html to
http://www.labs.redhat.com/gug/users-guide/
Is it worth it to fix this and put gnome-help-browser back on the
menus? Do users get any benefit from a friendly GUI to man and
info pages (which could be added separately)? Should the Gnome
Users' Guide useful supplementary documentation, or will it only
confuse people if it is accessible?
- Is there any reason for zephyrs not to stack such that when you
click them, they cycle through in chronological order?
- I think a middle-click on a window's title bar should
maximize/unmaximize it. (This would produce behavior consistent
with Windows.) I've put together Lisp to do this and can formally
submit the code as soon as I learn how to do cvs diffs properly.
- Should we turn off the "feature" that gives focus to a new
application window when it first appears? Beland opines: "It's
really annoying to say, start Netscape, go type in Emacs for three
minutes while it loads, and then have it steal keyboard focus in
the middle of a word." In usability testing, users seemed to
figure out very quickly that if an application wasn't responding to
keystrokes, they should click on it and try again.
- Should an entry be added to the Dash menu that will allow you to
revert back to Gnome-Athena if you've changed? (I.e., delete
~/.athena_dash_login)? Perhaps also check your .environment to see
if you need to change anything there? Or should users who do this
be expected to follow instructions on the web or contact OLC?
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
===============================================================
