Review Request: rename "import" action to "open as new"

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tuesday 14 August 2012 Aug, Jaroslaw Staniek wrote:

> Definitely Import and Open has been merged into one in many apps these
> days. 

Well, I don't know. I guess it depends, on the one hand you've got weird separations of import/open and export/save as in gimp, on the other hand, I've seen Kexi's "import, export or send" action (which I think is pretty confusing). I don't want to do a big reevaluation of how the komainwindow-based calligra applications handle this whole concept, just clarify one action by improving the text.

Yeah, that takes it out of the realm of the usual, but I think it would be an improvement.

> Import used to force user to know that the format is 'external' to
> the application's core functionality.

But it never worked that way. Not in KOffice, not in Calligra, not in other applications like Inkscape that have the traditional set of commands. Import has opened any suitable document in a KOffice or Calligra app for over a decade now, including the native file types.

> Regarding your proposal, I'm in favour of not having anything like "Open as
> new".

So what's your proposal? Remove the import option? All I propose to do here is to reword an action so it actually fits the bill. Maybe "Open as Unnamed Document" would be even better, though.

> Idea of one user cannot be a measure here,

Still, one user can have a good idea, as in this case. I like it, and I'm not alone.

> and this command looks very new to me. 

Well, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

> If unsure please ask our usability people for some advice
> before so exposed change happens.

But I'm not unsure.

> Should you not described what "open as new" means, I swear I would not have
> accurately guessed. Compared to Open, it just changes one state if the app.

But an important one, and I'm thinking that if few people use this useful option it's because they don't really know what it does. Clarifying that would be a good thing, in my mind.

> Please note it's already redundant because of that, from looking over
> shouders of various types of users, I see they tend to use one of the
> approaches:
> - Open + Save As
> - Open + Select + Copy content + New doc + Paste content.
> More permutations of these are possible too, I'll leave that for the reader
> :)

So it's not redundant, it would save the user a lot of keystrokes if only they realized what the command did.

> There's even overlapping with functionality of templates.

I disagree there, that functionality is almost completely different.

> So I'd like to also ask for links to existing software having this exactly
> action. When I asked someone about that, the only virtually similar (but
> textually!) was "open link in new window".

Well, I'm not going to provide you with that list. I think the proposal has enough merits on its own.

To summarize:

* we have an action that has been mislabeled for the past decade or longer
* because of that, users don't use it -- they don't know what it does
* we never renamed it because the current name is "traditional"
* but if we would rename it, it would be clear what it does and improve life for our users

Sounds like a win to me.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt
http://www.valdyas.org, http://www.krita.org, http://www.boudewijnrempt.nl