[Dapper] Mouse

[Alan McKinnon]

On Thursday 16 March 2006 05:51, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Wed, 15 Mar 2006 19:00:52 +0100
>
> Mario Vukelic <mario.vukelic at dantian.org> wrote:
> > > Gnome used to have a prominent "Control Centre" - surely
> > > something like that is a more logical place for settings of
> > > this nature?
> >
> > How so? the control also had categories in a tree view to the
> > left (just like the horrible jungle in KDEs config ;) so you have
> > only moved the problem to one step later: which category, mouse
> > or file manager?
>
> True - the user still has to choose where to look. I suppose really
> this is an "upstream" Gnome issue rather than Ubuntu-specific.
>
> I take your point about mouse settings  - but my point remains that
> _for a naive user_ , clicking behaviour would be expected to be
> under a "mouse" heading rather than a "file management" setting.

Without meaning to throw a cat in amongst the pigeons, I'd suggest 
that click behaviour goes in a third category, Desktop. To 
illustrate:

Desktop:
	Click behaviour
	Menus
	Background
	etc
Software:
	Browser
	File Manager (columns displayed, icon view, etc)
	etc
Hardware:
	Mouse
		Left hand, right hand
		Acceleration
		Mouse trails
	Keyboard
		Layout
		Type

Users see the left hand/right hand setting and click behaviour 
differently. With the first, they are directly dealing with something 
in their hand so it's a hardware thing. With the second, the focus is 
on what they see on the screen. It's not perceived as a mouse 
setting, it's seen as what does the system do with clicks once the 
mouse has sent them and the perception is that the setting should be 
consistent system-wide. Putting it in file manager makes sense to us 
who know what the file manager does, but a naive user has yet to make 
the connection between nautilus and the desktop. 

Or put another way, categories are best defined according to the 
"thing" the user feels they are interacting with. Gnome abstracts the 
Desktop as a distinct thing and the user sees it as such (ignoring 
for now the background role nautilus plays in making that happen). 
When the user opens a file manager window to see their files, that is 
a different thing to the Desktop so Nautilus deserves it's own 
setting to set icon view/list view etc.

The above is my experience from interacting with users, and I'd be 
really interested to see the results of usability studies in this 
area.

-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan at linuxholdings dot co dot za
+27 82, double three seven, one nine three five