On 15/07/05, Eric Larson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 2005-07-15 at 13:31 +0200, Diego Moya wrote: > > Those seem to be the relevant actions of current educated computer > > users: launch dedicated working environments (i.e. main applications), > > launch transient applications (desklets), find content (document > > search & browsing), and configure the computer settings & peripherals. > I have to disagree with your analysis regarding the separation between a > user launching apps and then finding content. Most users rarely > associate content outside the scope of a particular application. A > document or email is most often seen within the context of the > respective application. To turn this back to the initial thoughts of how
I agree that users have problems separating content from applications, but as long as the current desktop paradigm does not totally hide apps from the user, it's a good thing that the documents (which belong to the user) are clearly separated from the applications (which belong to the computer). They are managed differently anyway - you can't "create new applications", move them to arbitrary places in the hard disk (OK in Mac OS X you can, but it is quite different than Linux) etc. There are also task-based applications (as opposed to document-centric ones) like IM, mail, games, P2P and any setup/control panel. In this kind of apps, the user can clearly distinguish the app from the content (you can take a mail out of Evolution and save it as a document, mlDonkey downloads files from the net to the hard disk) > this fits into user putting things on the desktop, a good example can be > seen in how some use bookmarks on their desktop. Some users create a > bookmark for their favorite sites on the desktop and then click those > bookmarks to visit the site, closing the browser each time before going > to the next bookmark. While I don't think this is the most common use, > it makes it clear that a document is considered primarily within the > context of the application that works with it. > And that's why I say that applications are seen primarily as "context" or "working environments" (as opposed to how engineers see them, which is as "programs", prebuilt sets of instructions). _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
