My poor 2 usability cents on kickoff

[Matt Williams]

On Sunday 13 January 2008 15:52:56 Robert Knight wrote:
> Hi Gabriele,
>
> Thanks for your comments.  I have forwarded your email to the panel
> developers who are responsible for Kickoff.
>
> Regards,
> Robert.
>
> On 13/01/2008, Gabriele Menna <gabmen at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Forgive my poor english and the low quality of the mockups, please.
> >
> > I may, too, spend some times implementing some of the ideas shown in the
> > attached document. I'm a c++/qt programmer, after all...
> >
> > cheers
> >
> > g

1) While I agree with the reasons for this, I feel this would currently cause 
a bigger problem than it solves. Since tabs are activated on mouse over, once 
the user clicks on the kickoff icon and drags the mouse to the main kickoff 
area, they would pass over some of the bottom tabs on the way, changing the 
content. We don't have this problem at the moment since the pre-selected tab
"Favourites" is the one directly above the kickoff icon. If the code was 
changes such that the tabs were only selected on a click, I think this change 
would be a good one.
However, this does mean that the menu navigator (the grey bar with the arrow) 
would no longer be at the screen edge.

2) I like the idea of this but it does get rid of the user's ability to 
quickly throw the mouse to the screen edge to navigate to the parent level 
(of course, if solution 1 were to be done, this would no longer be possible 
anyway). Perhaps, a breadcrumb at the top of the scroller (much like the one 
in dolphin) would provide the needed contextual information?

3) I like that you've got the guts to (literally) think outside the box on 
this one. It's a nice solution to the problem and with some refinements could 
prove useful.

Of course, all this is my opinion of the ideas and all of this should be put 
by usability experts before anything is done. Perhaps SuSE would be willing 
to do a further review of these sorts of ideas?

Regards,
Matt Williams