More on usability

I’ve been spending a lot of my time recently thinking about usability. Don’t ask me why, but it’s something that has caught my interest of recent weeks. So here is a collection of random thoughts on that subject:

Double-Clicking

Following my recent post it was interesting to read peoples comments. I also disabled the final area of double-clicking that I used – double-clicking in the Windows file manager, which I hadn’t realised was enabled until I began thinking about it. And I’m pleased to say that I’ve found it really good – much quicker. The only real thing that you need to learn is how to select objects. Selection is done by hovering, which is not ideal really – why Windows doesn’t make better use of the middle-click like Linux, I don’t know. Selecting multiple objects can thus be quite fun, as can try to select things when that area of the window is not actually ‘active’, meaning that you can click, but not select. However, for the most part I currently prefer single-click action.

SymphonyOS

Just a quick note for this Debian-based distribution which is attempting a new way of presenting information – doing away with menus in favour of information displayed on the desktop. And this brings me to something that has been bugging me:

Desklets – are they usable/useful?

Desklets are small applications that run on the desktop and provide either information or a function. Linux has a number of programs to do it, Mac and Windows users have Konfabulator or Samurize (Windows only). There are probably others, but I couldn’t be bothered looking further.

I suppose my question is this – how helpful is this? I don’t look at my desktop at all – it’s covered in applications. Why is information placed there useful? I don’t really use desktop icons (although I have a tonne of them). Gdesklets are thus reduced, on my desktop, to startup eye-candy. However, for my friend Kester it’s great, because he has become used to running just a few applications minimised – this might perhaps be a way to work, but I can imagine that for me I would need applications to minimise when not focused to make it work, which would be a pain when you want more than 1 app open…..

Something that came to mind when thinking about this was an old desktop shell for Windows called ‘NextStart’, which still exists. Annoyingly, it’s not free NextStart assigned menus to hotspots on the desktop, but, more important, you could assign them to screen-edge or screen-corner ‘bumps’. Given that your screen edge is always “visible”, this is brilliant! One of it’s other cool tricks was that the menu system was cleverly based upon your actual folders, making it easy to create custom menus very quickly.

So – what am I looking for? Well – I would like some “desklets” that appear and disappear from the screen via an interaction that doesn’t involve clicking on the desktop anywhere, as this interferes with normal application usage. Screen bumps are good, although special key combos can work too.

Anyway – that’s probably all my thoughts for today; there are a couple more mulling around in my head, but I’ll get to them in due time.

Comments are, as always, welcomed.

mrBen