[Panel-devel] Kicker and Startmenu - Usability Work and Wiki

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Sunday 01 January 2006 10:10, Björn Balazs wrote:
> 2. We have created a very rough prototype of a totally new approach to the
> problem of controlling your system. Please feel invited to take a look and
> to comment on it at:
>
> http://wiki.openusability.org/kde-hci/index.php/KMenu

there are some of the interesting areas of exploration that we should consider 
in addition to application launching. these include:

grouping applications based on context and usage: do people launch and use 
applications as sets of tools or is the usage fairly random? is it useful to 
present dynamic groups for applications such as "recently used" and if so 
what is a good way to do so?

promotion of non-applications: documents, contacts, data sources (digital 
cameras, usb keys, network databases) etc are increasingly central to desktop 
usage. how can these be presented better as first class citizens so that we 
can choose to launch a contact versus opening up an instant messenger or 
email app?

searching: should searching display applications to launch only, or actions as 
well? if so, what should this look like? look at quicksilver for macos or 
this blog entry 
http://raphael.slinckx.net/blog/index.php/2005-10-02/deskbar-applet-hotness 
for concepts along this vein


many of the new approaches seem fairly complex, to be honest. not from a 
coding perspective, but from both the "amount of information displayed" and 
"amount of control UI" perspectives.

alex gravely showed me an interesting little app in pyGtk+ (called gimme) last 
month that displays just three buttons at the bottom of the screen: 
applications, documents and contacts. each button pops up a dialog that 
allows one to browse each in a typical "categories on the left, content of 
the category on the right" display with a single depth on the categories (if 
any). 

i'm not sure if it's enough for general usage or if people would eventually 
very constrained by it (his contention is that applets are useless and should 
be abandoned completely; that searching by content is not useful; etc), but 
it certainly shows a low-noise approach that does cover most use cases.

alright, enough rambling for now... =)

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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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