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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Remove Home icon from Desktop (was Mini usability study)
From:       illogic-al <obennett () hartford ! edu>
Date:       2004-09-30 19:21:49
Message-ID: 200409301521.49639.obennett () hartford ! edu
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On Sunday 26 Sep 2004 09:02 pm, Uno Engborg wrote:
> Maurizio Colucci wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > I conducted a mini-usability study on a 60 year old italian user
> > (lawyer by profession), used to openoffice and Windows XP.
> > His primary computer usage is word-processing (with both openoffice
> > writer and Word), home-video editing with pinnacle studio, cd burning,
> > web browsing, using digital cameras.
> >
> >
> > - "what's this home folder? Where are my disks?" he didn't understand
> > how to access the files on the windows partition (mounted in /win).
> > When I showed him the "devices" tab in konqueror's navigation panel,
> > he said that wasn't the right place to put the disks, and that "they
> > should be the first thing you see when you click home". When I
> > explained the concepts of "mounting", and the fact that the disks
> > appear in a folder determined in suse's YAST, he said it seemed
> > complicated.
>
> Perhaps its time to remove the home icon from the default desktop and
> instead present  a folder called "My Documents" or something similar.
> This directoury should be the standard storage area for files that the
> user creates knowingly by "save" and "save as" actions.
>
> This would be a good thing for several reasons:
>
>
> 1) The term home directory comes from the domain of computers. To
> understand it you need to know something about multiuser systems.
>      "My Documents" on the other hand comes from the domain of everyday
> life.  It is no surprise that this test subject doesn't understand the
> home  directory concept.
>
Are you frigging kidding me? It's a SIXTY year OLD man. Who gives a shit if he 
doesn't understand? Maybe since I'm all of 21 years old here and my brain is 
still able to realize that different operating systems tend do do things 
differently I'm the only one to find this mini usability "study" a complete 
and utter waste of <insert_not_nice_word_here> time. 
For the time being however, humor me and allow me the luxury of pointing some 
things out. 

a) "study"s can not be done with only ONE person. You either do them the 
represantative group of the users you are targetting, OR on a wide swath of 
users which actually use your product. 

b) Being different isn't a bad thing. If it were So we have a Home link 
instead of My Computers or my documents. Y'know what, no one's going to stop 
or start using KDE because of that one fact. 

c) If you're going to change something that users are likely to get up in arms 
about make sure you provide a damn good replacement or have some damn good 
proganda (real or not) to back it up. "The sixty year old man felt 
uncomfortable with it" excuse really isn't gonna fly.

>
> 2) The  unix home directory is used for settings. This means that it
> contains files that the user not knowingly have put there. This may
How exactly, do you "not knowingly" put a file somewhere?

> surprise the user or the user may unintentionally change settings.
No. The hidden directories in the $HOME directory is what actually contains 
settings. Directories which are visible are created by the user, or software 
the user uses to store data. 
So your "unintentionally change settings" of *hidden* directories theory kinda 
falls short there.
> Normaly the such files should be invisible dot-files but this is not
> always the case.
If that's not the case for you make a bug report to the apps author. Make sure 
you put "usability" big and bold in the headlines. I'm sure it'll be fixed, 
post-haste.
>
>
> 3) The home icon is hard to internationalize. Not all languages call the
> home directory something that have to do with homes or houses. I think
> germans call it Persönlishe Ordner or something like that. This problem
> probably springs from 1) as the computer concept of having a specific
> place for the files of each user have been translated diferently in
> different languages.
>
>
> 4) A user that opens the home directory from the icon on the desktop
> would expect to be able to press the up arrow, and end up on the
> desktop. As we all know he doesn't.  A "My Documents" folder should
> actualy recide in /home/unsername/Desktop
>
And where is your proof of this? I'm not saying your wrong, and it certainly 
sounds plausible, but I've never actually seen anyone, actually say that they 
expect this behaviour. Hey, here's one I just made up one posting usability 
suggestions 
a) A usabilty guru making suggestions on behalf of users should actually have 
data to back his/her assertions up.

>
> This doesn't solve the "Where is my disk?"  problem, 
No, it doesn't, does it?
> but it would make 
> it simpler for the user to find his documents.
Hardly. Documents don't magically appear in My Documents, apps have to save 
them there and even on windows, this isn't done by default. Of course, I 
haven't used Word in a while. In any case, linux apps would have to _by 
default_ go to this My Documents/Documents directory for this to be useful. 
You see just having the directory there still wont help the old man find his 
docs cause that's not where they are going to be saved anyways. Having it 
there would just be a problem because he would expect it to save stuff there 
and get pissed when not a damn thing turns up. 

> Gnome partly solves this by inroduceing a "Computer" folder where
> computer related things reside. This makes it easy to find periphal
> units and other computer related stuff, but it still doesn't offer any
> help finding mounted disks as the entire filesystem appears as one
> single disk icon. 
And perhaps the ONLY thing I agree with you on is that this single folder/icon 
would make users feel more comfortable. Greatly improve usability, however? I 
doubt it. How many non power users will even be able to save stuff outside of 
$HOME unless they are root?

> Perhaps we could improve on that and open a konqueror 
> view with a sidebar containg icons for the various physical disks that
> makes up
> the filesystem.  When one of the disk icons was selected, the other view
> of konqueror could show the contents of corresponding mountpoint.
You've got to be fucking kidding me. Do you even use KDE? 

> Perhaps the home directory could fit in here as well, but  I'm not quite
> sure how to differentiate it from physical disks.
>
> So in the end we would have "Computer" "My Documents" and "Trash" as
> icons on the default KDE desktop.
>
> Regards
> Uno Engborg

And in conclusion, the apologies...
Uno (can I call you Uno? ) If it seemed like I was personally attacking you, I 
wasn't... I was attacking your ideas :-D
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