[Panel-devel] Fwd: KMenu: Users and Usage

[Matthias Welwarsky]

On Friday, 21. October 2005 08:10, Barış Metin wrote:
> Thursday 20 October 2005 13:39 tarihinde, Celeste (seele) Paul şunları
>
> yazmıştı:
> > Primary audience revisited: By volume there are more Beginning users
> > actually using the KMenu (in most to all cases of application launching,
> > browsing for software, learning the system), however it is just as
> > important for Moderate users (primarily for browsing software, but also
> > launching applications).  Improvements to the menu may change usage
> > patterns of all groups.  A good target audience for the KMenu would be in
> > between Beginner and Moderate users.  The menu will be easy enough for
> > the newest user to train and overcome, but advanced enough with features
> > to accomodate Moderate users.  Beginner and Moderate users are the bulk
> > of our targeted KDE audience as well as the primary users for the KMenu.
>
> Thank you for the detailed report :). I'm sure this will be very helpful
> improving the K Menu.
>
> What I understand is, the main usage is based on the two needs:
>
> - browse the application list and learn the system.
> - search for infrequently used applications.
>
> Are these the only things we need to improve on K Menu?

Well. The research work Celeste presented at aKademy kind of proved that a 
menu is not very good at providing quick access unless the number of items in 
it is small. It does not seem to work well in general for large numbers of 
entries. Categorizing entries like we do with KMenu is a way to mitigate that 
in theory, but in practice it does not work all that well because you cannot 
reliably find appropriate categories. "Utilities" is just one, nevertheless a  
perfect example: you can expect to find just _anything_ filed under 
utilities, so as a category it's of no use. And the other way 'round, you can 
find arbitrary applications that match more than one category, whatever set 
of categories you provide.

Long story short: menus just don't work for large numbers of items. So I think 
KMenu is just not an appropriate search tool by design and little can be done 
about that.

By the way, that particular problem shows up in other places as well: just try 
to add an applet to kicker :-) The way you're forced to work yourself through 
the menu is just awkward. So actually we need a solution not only for the 
KMenu ...

Proposal: We know that a menu does not work for a large number of entries, so 
we should try to avoid menu entries instead of trying to find the perfect way 
to organize them.

regards,
	matthias