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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Usability and sugestions.
From:       Netalix <netalix () yahoo ! com>
Date:       2001-07-25 19:33:56
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Hello.

As part of a research paper / article I wrote, I did some basic
usability comparisons between Ximians Gnome (1.2) and KDE (2.1.1).

two groups of 5 people with the following demographic breakdown.

1: "Geek" 
3: "average user" 
1: "clueless grandparent" 

they where seated in front of their computer at the respective
greeter/login app (kdm/gdm) and asked to complete a list of 10 tasks
ranging from changing the background, to finding the word processor,
typing a sentance, and printing it. (all of the configuration work was
done before hand by me, IE: printer was setup and ABI word and Kword
were installed awaiting the user).

Each user was timed. 

On average the KDE people finished about 1.56 (minute.seconds) faster
than the Gnome people. (noteable exception the geek on the kde "team"
decided to forgo all graphical interfaces and complete the
configuration tasks (change background etc) by hand by editing files.
he failed to complete his task set, and said that the KDE config files
where esoteric and not "user friendly")

user comments were written down, and are as follows (with notes by me).

1: the wallpaper chooser should be more like a ACDSee (windows program)
window. (basicly what she wanted was something akin to the Icon chooser
for KDE. when you go to change the wallpaper, a window pops up showing
graphical representations of the files isntead of their name. this
shouldn't be a dificult thing to implement (if you know how) as
konq/kfm has the "make immage gallery" option...) 

2: The KDE and Gnome people were allowed to interact and discuss what
they liked and didn't like. the most noteable thing to come from this
cross discussion is that Windows XP style taskbars are a highly
requested feature. For those of you who have never seen WinXP, the XP
and Gnome Task bars group like windows together under one entry on the
task bar. For instance if you had 4 Konq windows open, you would see on
the task bar only one Konq button, but if you clicked on it, a menu
poped up from it listing all 4, which allows you to choose which one
you want. The Gnome team loved that feature, and the KDE team was
excited by the talk of it. I have no idea how to implement that or even
whats involved with getting that to work, but it seems to me that it
does increase screen use efficency, and with the myriad of apps (gimp,
kaim, etc) that spawn multiple windows it seems to me that this makes a
windowing enviroment much more user friendly / useable for the novice.

3: "what the hell does the push pin do" (refering to the "sticky" icon
on the title bar)

4: Ximains Doorman was well appreciated by the Gnome people and the KDE
people thought it would be a welcome addition to KDE. (I *think* this
is in 2.2betas but I could be wrong)

5: One user thought that the Nautilus media integration was a feature
that should be looked into. (in nautilus you can list a directory as
"music" and when you go into it, instead of seeing file names you see
the id3 tag info, and you have play controls on a extra menu bar type
thing. The same can be done with pictures etc.)

-Kevin

=====
May the Penguin be with you!
    (o_      Kevin Poorman
    //\      Netalix@Yahoo.com
    V_/_     AOLIM: Netalix, Shyslpwlkr or TheUnchosen1

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