|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| home | help | back | first | fref | pref | prev | next | nref | lref | last | post |
Message-Id: <200107221844.OAA35690@whack-a-mole.mit.edu> To: aui@MIT.EDU Date: Sun, 22 Jul 2001 14:44:49 -0400 From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU> So I read through the Sun usability test on Gnome. They discovered a lot of the same things we did; I wrote them a little note telling them about what we've done with menu items and the panel as a result of these realizations. I thought I'd run it by this list before I sent it off to them. One thing which their testing reiterates, which we still have not addressed, is making it easy for users to add applets to their panel. Right now, the only way to do that is to right-click on the panel itself. If we don't find a good way to add the Applets menu to the system menus (or even if we do), I recommend adding a "Customizing Panel" menu entry to "Settings" (which is where the Sun volunteers expected to find the thing that lets them add a clock to panel). We would want this entry to point to an Athenized version of the panel section of the Gnome User's Guide; see, for example: http://www.labs.redhat.com/gug/users-guide/panelbasics.html I assume something like this is in the werks? 8) Anyway, here is the letter for Sun-Gnome-HCI@sun.com: --- I was reading with interest the report Sun recently produced on Gnome usability. I was pleased to notice that the Sun Gnome HCI team picked up on many of the same usability problems as did MIT Information Systems' internal tests. In particular, we have made some changes to our menu structure and panel icons so that users of Athena (the campus-wide Unix-based computing environment) will have an easier time navigating. You may be interested in our solutions. A peek at the panel is available at: http://web.mit.edu/aui/evaluation/9.0.10-panel.gif We included text labels for these icons after an internal graphic design process showed that it was difficult to come up with purely pictorial indicators for the functions these buttons represent. We chose to use pictures of words, rather than altering panel source code to allow actual text to be included there. This is only to allow us to change the labels globally by changing the icon, which is stored in a central place on our shared file system. If we had used the actual-text approach, the text would unfortunately be saved in the user's home directory, and would be difficult to change if we say, switched from Netscape to Mozilla. Note that the visual in the prompt icon corresponds to the actual appearance of the "athena%" prompt one sees in gnome-terminal. The tooltips for the launchers and menus, from left to right, read: Main menu Read e-mail Web browser Command line prompt Edit text files Log out of GNOME You can download a copy of our menu tree at http://web.mit.edu/aui/evaluation/9.0.10-menus.tar.gz We have used more or less only three icons, namely the ones in: http://web.mit.edu/aui/icons/menus/ to signify menu entries that open documentation in a web browser (info.png), start a program (gnome-run.png), or represent a subdirectory (gnome-folder.png). These menus are of course highly customized for Athena, but the high-level categories are probably generally useful to examine, especially since we have spent a considerable amount of time trying to make them as user-friendly as possible. We have also changed the visual appearance of menu titles, because during usability tests, users had trouble distinguishing them from menu items: http://web.mit.edu/aui/evaluation/9.0.10-menu-shot.gif We have unfortunately not yet integrated applets into our menu system. Thanks! Christopher Beland Athena User Interface Project =============================================================== Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project The Talk of MIT ** http://web.mit.edu/beland/talk/talk.html ===============================================================
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| home | help | back | first | fref | pref | prev | next | nref | lref | last | post |