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List:       kde-devel
Subject:    user friendliness - suggesting improvements
From:       Cristian Tibirna <ctibirna () total ! net>
Date:       1999-04-17 4:52:09
[Download RAW message or body]

Hi

Please, notice that I already answered to some of the mentions of my
fellow. But most of his suggestions are very interesting.

Please, Cc: your answers to him directly too.


Cristian Tibirna     : ctibirna@total.net     : www.total.net/~ctibirna
PhD Student          : ctibirna@gch.ulaval.ca : web.gch.ulaval.ca/~ctibirna
KDE contact - Canada :  tibirna@kde.org       : www.kde.org

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 11 Apr 1999 14:22:25 -0400
From: Dimitrie O. Paun <dimi@cs.toronto.edu>
To: Cristian Tibirna <ctibirna@total.net>
Subject: Sarbatori fericite + KDE :)



Hello everybody,

Congratulations on the excellent work that has gone into KDE. I use it
and I love it! It has helped me (with my Linux advocacy) and my family
(with using Linux) tremendously.

I would like to say that I am also a developer and a fellow Unix
user. While I do not have time at the present moment for hacking KDE,
I thought I contribute some feedback (based on my experience and my
family comments on KDE) to the KDE project. I hope my message is going
to be interpreted for what is: a bunch of constructive comments meant
to help a wonderful desktop environment get better.

I hope that everybody agrees that the _fundamental_ feature of a
desktop environment is the interaction with the user. In other words,
*feedback* is what make or breaks a desktop environment. At the
moment, I think KDE can improve on this aspect quite a bit. I consider
this usability bugs and they should be fixed IMO. Here they are:
  1. in kdm, when you type your passwords, you get no feedback. 
     Stars should be displayed. The lack of feedback is very confusing
     and annoying. It is a trivial thing, but can have a great negative
     effect on the user.

  2. after you login, there is no feedback to suggest that it will take
     while to load all application. The cursor should turn to hourglass.
     I have a slow computer (a 4 year old P90 that also runs applications
     for a X terminal) and I hate to see my mom clicking and asking 
     what a hell is going on when she logs on.
 
  3. needless to point out, when you start an application there is, again,
     no feedback. You can just imagine how long it takes to start Netscape
     on my machine. Well, my mom used to start a great number of instances
     because she was using the X terminal, she did not know what was going
     on (did not hear the HD) and she kept on clicking the icon (not to
     mention she can't help double clicking!). I know there were large
     debates how to provide this feedback. I do not want to start another
     flamewar, but I think the feedback should be through the mouse pointer
     (that is, change the cursor to arrow+hourglass). Why:
        - when you click on something, you have your attention focused on 
          that spot. It serves no purpose to provide the feedback in 
          another place! The only option left is to animate/change the 
          icon you clicked on but what do you do if you start an 
          application through a menu?
        - I know the argument that you want to let the user to something 
          else. But the arrow+hourglass does just that. Besides, 99.99% 
          of the users to things serially. There is no reason to penalize
          the vast majority of users for the odd power user that sometimes
          wants to do something else. Besides, it is _much_ easier to
          teach a power user that there is somewhere else an option to 
          change this sort of behavior or that she can do anything she
          wants to when the cursor is arrow+hourglass than it is to
          retrain a clueless user to another sort of feedback.
      I can not stress enough how important this point is.

  4. in the KDE Control Center when you change pages, there is no hourglass
     to suggest that something is going on. VERY annoying. It takes a lot
     time to change pages in my machine and it gets on my nerves every time
     I use it.

  5. in kfm, there is no hourglass when you click on a directory or on a
     file. Believe it or not, it can take seconds on my machine to display
     the content of a directory. Again, very confusing. Even I get confused
     sometimes. For example, I clicked on a tar.gz file. Nothing happened.
     I waited, waited and than (about 1-2 min later) decided that something
     bad happened and clicked again. And so on for a few times. Well, after
     doing that I realized that I opened a _very_ large archive (10MB) and
     I ended up with 5 karchive on my screen (and that kind of brought my
     machine to its knees).

  6. when you drag a file over the tree in kfm, there is no highlighting
     of the target, there is no telling where the file is going to end up.
     I do not like this uncertainty a bit.

This are only some examples of the feedback problem. I think it is
very important that these problem are solved soon. I would love to
see at least some of them in KDE 1.1.1. 

I do have other suggestions but I will save them for another message. This
one got too big as it is. Thank you for reading this far.

Regards,
Dimi.

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