solution?

[Eric Dunbar]

On 12/17/05, Scott <angrykeyboarder at angrykeyboarder.com> wrote:
> Jeff Waugh wrote:
> > <quote who="Michael Shigorin">
> >
> >> Maybe someone tells the GNOME usability kids the magic keywords "user
> >> level"?
> >
> > You may wish to go back and look at the failures of user levels in projects
> > such as Sawfish and Nautilus. It merely serves to increase the combinatorial
> > explosion of preference overload. We've discussed it. We've tried it. It did
> > not succeed.
> >
> > Plus there's a lot of weighty academic material written on this issue, which
> > we haven't ignored.
> >
> > - Jeff
>
> GNOME still has strangely ignored some pretty *basic* newbie-friendly
> stuff as I've pointed out here:
> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=171048&cid=14261103

hi, that stuff isn't particularly important though! So you can't
change the colour! Unless you have a particular visual impairment,
you're unlikely to be affected by default colour choices.

As for ignoring _real_ HUMAN-friendly stuff... how about the problem
with dead-space at the edges of screens?

More than 20 years ago, research already showed that the _easiest_
thing for a mouse user to is to hit the edge, and, especially, corners
of the screen. Unfortunately, GNOME doesn't implement that pretty
simple but major feature very well. Menus are the most logical place
for such a user-interface implementation (since they are the most
often used element of the user interface) but, alas, GNOME hasn't used
this most elementary piece of GUI research -- even if you "full
screen" an application, menus still have WASTED dead space between
screen edge and the menu choices (not to mention the faulty paradigm
of menubar-in-window which makes it much harder to use menus,
especially for people with limited or degenerating fine motor skills).

Anyway, someday I hope to see someone take the initiative to make a
"skin" for GNOME or KDE which will implement usability research (as
opposed to copying Windows :-(((.

Eric.