On Aug 13, 2006, at 5:29 AM, Michael R. Head wrote: > > On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 12:36 +0200, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote: >> >> Efficiency is only one aspect of usability, and there might be other >> reasons to keep using separate applets (ability to show multiple >> categories simultaneously? substantially different ideal window >> widths? ease of extension?), but none that I can think of stand out >> as being particularly important. > > Yeah, and GOMS analyses, while great at measuring maximum UI efficiency > for expert users
Did you miss the part where I was including the number of mistakes? :-) > should be at best a secondary tool for designers, IMHO. The best thing > (as always) is to do a study with a selection of target users. User studies would be important to measure learnability and satisfaction. They probably wouldn't give useful information about efficiency or memorability, unless they lasted for for weeks or months. > To put it another way, if browser mode is harder to comprehend for > file management, why is it good for control panels? > ... Because with file management, the number of items in a group changes more often, wanting to view more than one set of stuff at once is much more common, and dragging items from one group to another is the most obvious way to move or copy them. To put it another way, browse mode turns file moving and copying into an expert-only feature. (Experts can learn how "Cut", "Copy", and "Paste" have inconsistent meanings between file manager windows and document windows.) -- Matthew Paul Thomas http://mpt.net.nz/ _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
