[Digikam-devel] Some usability observations

[Marcel Wiesweg]

Hi,

this afternoon I had quite unvoluntarily the opportunity to "conduct a 
usability study" on digikam.
My father was returning from a holiday with a few photos and I told him to tag 
some remaining photos I could not categorize.
He was not familiar with digikam, but he is doing daily work (Outlook) with 
his Windows machine so he should know what computers are about. Additional 
difficulty was the touchpad of my laptop he is not used to, but we cannot 
expect our users to be mouse acrobats.
I am using digikam 0.7.2, some issues may have been fixed or made invalid in 
the 0.8 line.

-"These five are Colonna Marc Aurel"
  Four thumbnails are in a row, the fifth has to be marked as well.

- Clicks on the first one to mark it. Windows users do this, I think.

- After an inadvertent click, the editor appears. This was not intended, and 
it is unclear  that this is actually a second window above the first one.

- "How do I get back?" I don't know if he has noticed by now that this is a 
second window, probably he thinks it is still the same window. There is no 
indication how to get _back_. I tell him to click on the well-known [X] 
button in the upper right corner (having the Windows style on my KDE). BTW, 
Esc does not work.

- At this point, I help by marking the five photos, opening the comments&tag 
editor via right click, choosing Create new tag at the right location of the 
"Rome" tag hierarchy. He enters the tag's name.

- Does not know what this was good for. The newly created tag is not marked, 
it is not even visibly. And it is not checked (One may assume that a tag 
created in the tag editor is automatically checked, and I sense he assumed 
that too, but this is controversial I think). I tell him what to do, he 
closes the dialogue

-Irritated:"It is only assigned to one of those." Only the one picture I 
right-clicked has the tag assigned, but five are marked. I promise to take 
care of this later on.

- Next photos: Circus Maximus. This time I plan to make him use the 
drag'n'drop assignment method.

- Selectiong is more successful this time. He knows about Shift+Click and uses 
it instead of Strg+Click, but the photos are in line so it works. Another 
inadvertent click (touchpad's fault, but nevertheless), and the selection is 
gone, editor appearing. Back to main window, all over again, luckily it is 
only a few photos.

- Selecting is done, looking for the right category. There is Forum Romanum, 
but no Circus Maximus as of yet. I tell him to right-click in the tag 
hierarchy ("Ancient Rome"), he creates the tag.

- But what's that! Now the tag "Rome antique" is selected, different photos 
are shown, the selection is gone! I explain him what has happened.

-Returning to the upper category "Rome" from where the adventure started, not 
only the selection is gone. We are now at the top of a list of 350 photos. 
Previously, we were somewhere in the middle of this list. Now, this place, 
the scrolling state, is lost as well.

That was the point where I took over and secretly declared the experiment as 
failed.
I know and appreciate that digikam has great documentation, but I won't tell 
my father to read it. He has no time, and besides the KDE help viewer has 
lots of usability issues itself.
I really appreciate that digikam allows for efficient once you know how to do 
this and, more important, what to do _not_ (losing selections etc.). But new 
users will fall in these trap doors quite often. I have to admit that I 
really got annoyed a few times tagging those other 330 photos when a right 
click on the left panel to create a new tag would actually select the 
right-clicked entry, losing selection and scrolling location.

Since I am no usability expert in any way I won't make improvement suggestions 
here, I just told you what I watched with my own eyes ;-)

Marcel