usability testing of breadcrumb

[Aaron J. Seigo]

hi all...

just a status update on things: i've been testing the usability of the 
breadcrumb on random strangers as well as family and friends this past week. 
adjustments have been made in response to these findings and i have more 
testing to do due to these findings.

the promising news is that people really find it easy to use .... once they 
discover it. 

the discovery of the bradcrumb is the hard part. it's not obvious enough to 
them, perhaps due to its size and positioning and relative lack of eye 
catching feedback, e.g. when a new dir is added having some brief and elegant 
animation for the entry of the button. i'll be working on the latter to see 
if it helps discoverability any.

one person i tested happens to be a mac user and was so impressed by the 
experience (he also ended up looking through gwenview and a few other kde 
apps while performing tasks) that he said he might just have to check 
out "this open source stuff". he commented the mac hides too much from him, 
though not in as frustrating a way as windows was, and that he found using 
KDE a much nicer balance in that regard. this comment was made in direct 
reference to the breadcrumb and sidebars ...

so we may be on to something here =)

interestingly enough i've been doing these usability tests with the toolbar 
not showing and people manage just fine. i've had queries about where the 
toolbar is and that they would use it if it was there but then these same 
individuals end up navigating amazingly well and quickly without it. i just 
hid it to force them to use the breadcrumb and sidebar so i could see where 
they fell down; not needing the toolbar at all has been a bit of a surprise.

the protocol combo is now nicer looking and less "in your face" and i'm also 
pretty close to having them only appear when -absolutely necessary-. they 
already don't show when a dolphin bookmark is being used, but kevin ottens 
and i are working on extending that and making the breadcrumb even more 
usable in when used with ioslaves that represent dynamic views that lead to 
specific data locations (e.g. media:/, remote:/, system:/) by using 
redirects ...

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

Full time KDE developer sponsored by Trolltech (http://www.trolltech.com)
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