[RFC]Application menu entries leave a lot to be desired

[Yorvyk]

On 31/10/12 12:48, Yorvyk wrote:
> During my brief bit of usability testing with software centres
> another problem reared it's ugly head. Some of the entries in the
> apps menu are remarkable for their meaninglessness and could do with
> changing. As an example: Menu > Office > Gnumeric with the tooltip -
> 'Calculation, Analysis, and Visualisation of Information".
>
> My three users have never really used a spreadsheet and this meant
> nothing to them.  Their suggestion was to change the menu entry to
> 'Gnumeric Spreadsheet' or some thing similar, as long as sit
> contained the word 'spreadsheet. Abiword was recognised as a
> word-processor, but only because it had 'word' in it's name. They
> also struggled to find a PDF viewer.  Evince is labelled 'Document
> Viewer' with the tool tip saying 'View multi-page documents'.  No
> mention of PDF. I'll be going through the menu later in the week with
> a couple of them to see if they can come up with some more obvious
> entries.  I'll then raise a bug for this.
>
We had a rather short session on this, but the consensus was that some
entries don't make it obvious what they are. Things like gnumeric and 
sylpheed are not well known and don't really give a clue from their name 
what they do. I know they have tool-tips to expand the description, but 
if you're just opening menus looking for an application these don't show 
up until you hover over the entry. The suggestion was to have simple 
entries like spreadsheet or email. When I suggested that some people may 
have more than one spreadsheet or word-processor installed they were 
puzzles why, but agreed that some thing like sylpheed e-mail client 
would be OK. So we ended up with the following, others may need to be 
dealt with, but these were the most obvious in the short time we had.

Audacious Music Player
Calculator - (with a 'C' not a 'G' as this looks like a typo)
Evince PDF Viewer
Gnumeric Spreadsheet
Guvcview Web-cam viewer
Leafpad Editor
Mplayer Video Player
Sylpheed E-mail Client
Transmission Bit-torrent
Xpad Notes

We'll have a look at others and the tool tips next time I see them.


--
Steve