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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Showed LiveCD with 3.4 beta
From:       Uno Engborg <uno () webworks ! se>
Date:       2005-02-23 15:07:23
Message-ID: 421C9C2B.90800 () webworks ! se
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I showed the KDE 3.4 Live CD to some friends the other day. In their 
oppinion (and now mine) the text that accompaines the icons in the 
navigational panel should fall down below the icon when it is clicked. 
Not above it as it is now.

The icon is much more graphicaly heavy than the text, this means that 
when you click one of
the icons you move your eye downward past the emerging text to the icon 
before you start reading.  As most people in the western world read text 
from left to right and top to bottom
this feels a bit awkward. Another surprising effect is that the icon you 
clicked moves awy from under your mouse.

I also asked my friends what they thaught the icons ment, just by 
looking at them without seeing any tooltips. I had them independently 
write down what they thaught they ment.
Their answers were:

The star: "Don't know", "Don't know", "Rate content"
The clock: "Schedueled Tasks", "Calendar","Calendar"
The house: "Home directory", "Home directory", "Home directory"
The net globe: "Bookmarks", "Bookmarks", "Bookmarks",
The red folder: "Show Folders", "Show Folders", "Show Folders"
The red flag: "Show warnings", "Show errors", Don't know"

Not that encurrageing. Thank god there is tooltips.

When they were allowed to look at the tooltips, they all managed to
describe "Bookmarks", "History", "Home Folder",  "Root Folder"
whithout any problem. On "Network" they all suggested file servers
for shared files (E.g. windows computers with shared folders)
On "Services" only two people had any suggestions, and they suggested
controls to see  for webservers, ftp-servers, nameservers, databases


When I finnally allowed them to look at the actual content, they couldn't
explain the difference between "Network" and "Bookmarks", and to be
honest neither can I. 

Just like me, they got even more confused when they saw the same 
networked globe icon in the new konqueror start page not representing 
the same thing but instead something kalled remote:/ where the same icon 
turned up again with seamingly yet some other meanings.
I didn't manage to get the network going  so we could not explore this 
in full.

Perhaps contents of the Navigation panel should be changed in some other 
way.
Just using icons can be very sensitivve to cultural differences. It 
seams to be  hard to differentiat similar things only from icons. 
Perhaps a popup menu at the top could do
the trick. If we use icons they should at least be used consistently.

Comments anyone?

Regards
Uno Engborg


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