On Fri, May 14, 2004 at 05:29:33PM +0300, Panu Matilainen wrote:
> On Fri, 14 May 2004, seth vidal wrote:
> > I interact with users everday - more importantly users of desktop linux
> > systems and they pick over the apps all day until they find one they
> > like, then they cling to it like lichen on a cave wall.
>
> Heh, nice expression :) The "most users" term bothers me here - maybe the
> average secretary in corporate environment isn't interested in editing
> menus or evaluating different applications but that's not the target crowd
> of FC, the last I heard.
Well I have never felt the need to change the menu myself, but that's
because I use the shell far too much.
In general I'm a bit vary of the concept of "normal user" vs. "power user",
because we try to make a global picture of it and I don't think it reflects
actual user behaviour. A user will learn more about an interface if there
are informations about how to change the way it interract with it. To me the
most common example is having shortcuts keystroke printed when you display
a menu, if you don't show them, 99% of the users will not learn any of them
(see how long it takes to make progresses in vi as an example). And IMHO
2 person can become more proficient in the use of a given interface even if
they take different ways to adapt their behaviour. User A may add a shortcut
to the application on the desktop, User B may add it to the menu if not present
and User C may use the "Open recent" to always get to the same document.
The common pattern between both are:
- that there is some user specific information associated to the interface
to customize it to the current user way to interract with it
- that you need some knowledge from the interface that such customization
is possible
IMHO Colin is right that most users won't modify the menu if there is no
easy way to do it indicated from the interface itself (IMHO a good plug would
be by within the Run Application dialog). Whether allowing the menu to be
modified to fit a given user way to interract with the interface boils down
to :
1/ an estimate wether this would help users
2/ how hard it would be to support this option
3/ finding a good way to plug the support in the interface
1/ seems to be unclear
2/ keeping a copy of the XML should not be hard
3/ seems not that simple.
Daniel
--
Daniel Veillard | Red Hat Desktop team http://redhat.com/
veillard@xxxxxxxxxx | libxml GNOME XML XSLT toolkit http://xmlsoft.org/
http://veillard.com/ | Rpmfind RPM search engine http://rpmfind.net/
