Breadcrumbs in Kickoff

[Martin Klapetek]

Hi,

I don't have any strong opinions to either solution, but I just want to
state my views on this discussion.

<snip>


> > It's a simple fact that it requires less mouse movement,
> If you state "facts" you have to prove them. Where is your usability study
> showing that a movement to the left is better than a movement to the top?
>

In my opinion, the breadcrumbs make sense with deep/long paths. My kickoff
from 4.8/master has everything only one level deep, therefore making the
breadcrumb navigation rather useless (because you can click only the "All
Applications" anyway). So if we went down the road of making kickoff less
"deep", then imho breadcrumb looses its purpose and back button would be
just enough.

Then again, it at least shows where you currently are, so if you for
example close kickoff with some category opened and you reopen kickoff, you
can immediately see "All Applications > Internet" so you know where you
are. Also there are things like Wine which pretty much recreates the
Windows Start menu structure, so you can get 5 levels deep in notime.

As for the mouse movement - if one uses larger kickoff, imho it indeed is
easier to move the mouse just few pixels to the left than moving it all the
way across (consider laptop's touchpad).



> > Would you support removing the back button from Dolphin, in favour of
> just
> > breadcrumbs?
> > I doubt that anyone would support that.
> I thought about it and I had to open Dolphin to verify that there is a back
> button at all. I doubt I have used the back button during the last few
> years.
> So yes I would support that.
>

The back button in Dolphin is actually /very/ useful, consider you're
working in

/home/user/work/project1/subproject3/source/

then you want to move to

/home/user/work/

do something (copy a file) and then back to the first one. So you click the
"work/" in breadcrumb and then you can either navigate all the folders OR
simply click the Back button. I use it every single day ;)


> >
> > I've chatted briefly with the KDE Usability Team, and they actually
> seemed
> > to agree with me.
> Sorry to say: but with whom have you talked? Not everybody who says he is
> in
> the KDE Usability Team is a usability expert but just a user who thinks he
> understands usability. That's quite a difference.
>

I agree that you should either post a log of your conversation or forward
the messages with names. Otherwise it's just a blunt statement.


>
> And what do you mean with "seemed"? They either agree or don't agree.
> >
> > Well some users might stick to the breadcrumb navigation, the majority of
> > users from previous versions of KDE are accustomed to the back button,
> and
> > appreciate its use, both in Kickoff as well as in Dolphin.  Including
> both
> > types of navigation will ensure that nobody complains, and presumably,
> lead
> > to a better overall user experience.
> Do you have any facts that this is actually the case? I don't have any
> statistics validating or disvalidating your statement. The only thing I can
> tell you is that there is a vocal minority requesting to add the feature
> back[2]. With less than ten users posting to the bug report, I am sorry to
> tell you that there seems no demand for this feature. (Btw. don't even try
> to
> rally now that users post to the bug report. If that is going to happen I
> will
> make sure that the bug gets made read only).
>

Having both types in kickoff at the same time seems a bit wrong to me too.
Having an option to switch that on the other hand would be more sensible. I
would suggest to find someone who can implement it in Martin's newest
kickoff branch in such way, that it won't be more work to maintain. Maybe
even the whole navigation system could be modified to fit both options (I
don't know how it currently works)? But again, as Martin clearly stated
he's not in favor of doing this, find someone who will do it and have him
work together with Martin.

--
Martin Klapetek | KDE Developer
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/plasma-devel/attachments/20111217/aa1aee14/attachment.html>