The Desktop/Computer Battle

[Scott James Remnant]

Ok, everyone seems to have different opinions about this; I count three
major ones:

  1) Put Home/Documents, Filesystem, Floppy/CD-ROM, Network, etc. on the
     Desktop  (Me)

  2) Put Home/Documents and Computer on the desktop, other icons inside
     the desktop Computer icon (Jeff)

  3) Put nothing on the desktop and put the icons under the Computer
     menu instead (Mark)


Each of these has different merits, however I don't think we're going to
reach a good consensus just yet and more importantly...

WE ARE RELEASING IN TWO WEEKS!

This stuff requires serious user testing, actually sitting users of each
of the different classes down with each of the setups and working out
what they react well and badly to.


I therefore think we should consider this modification a feature, just
like usplash etc.  We had to cut that for warty (sadly, I was getting
quite excited about it) because it wouldn't receive enough testing --
likewise I think we need to cut this for warty because it won't receive
enough testing.

Going with a broken boot sequence would've been a serious fuck-up;
likewise I think going with a broken desktop/menu layout/paradigm will
be too.


So with my "desktop hat" on, I'm going to suggest:

  1) we remove "Home" and "Desktop" from the Computer menu.

  2) we leave Computer and Trash on the desktop

  3) we either restore "Home" to the desktop, or put "Documents" there

  4) we make it a Hoary Feature Goal that we've decided on a desktop/
     menu layout for this stuff and worked out an upgrade strategy for
     warty users that doesn't break the golden rule.

  5) we make sure we do full user testing in the hoary time frame to
     work out the perfect desktop/menu layout.


And if anyone pipes up, I'm going to bash your heads together <g>

Let's get warty out the door with the important bugs fixed, and revisit
this in a few weeks time for hoary when we'll have the luxury of six
months to get it right.

Scott
-- 
~scott
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