Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-gnome (61 mails)

[Bryen <suserocks@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2008-08-07 at 21:20 +0200, Casual J. Programmer wrote:
> > The funny thing about greeters is that people do consider it 
> > important/interesting but they'll get back to it later.  I do 
> > that here on openSUSE, and on my XP Tablet laptops that I've 
> > had for several years, I know there's lots of cool info about 
> > how to use Tablet features, but I keep telling myself, I'll 
> > read it later.  As a consequence, I never disable it, it 
> > keeps popping up at startup, but never read for several years now.
> >
> > People have an inherent tendency to try first, read later.  
> > As such, I would probably put it in Main Menu rather than as 
> > a pop up.  
>
> The funny thing about people is, they keep telling themselves as well as
> others that their shortcomings apply to everybody else in the universe.
>
> If greeter has useful information, it should be moved to a help file and
> greeting should be dropped. If it has no useful information it should just
> be dropped. If Bryen didn't read his greeter for several years in
> succession, it's because he simply doesn't need it, no matter what he is
> telling himself about missed occasions.
>
> Casual

In general, I agree with your philosophy.  However, to point out several
things...

To use the "greeter" on my Tablet as an example again, in fact, I very
rarely utilize the true power of TabletPc's.  I always tell myself, yeah
I'll learn, but in reality, haven't yet.  Does it mean I don't need it?
Sure, I'm doing just fine without it.  Does it mean I'm fully maximizing
my TabletPC?  Yes to that too.  So, whether a person reads the info in
greeter or not, doesn't necessarily mean whether they need/should know
that info or not.

The other thing, you mentioned that content in there should go into Help
files.  I see the Greeter as more of a "Did you know...?" function than
a help function.  People don't go to Help to learn new things about
openSUSE.  They go there to learn how to fix a problem they currently
have.

So, the real question is, where should the information go where it can
be relevantly accessed?  We seem to all agree that the greeter has a
psychological effect of being ignored, yet the information within
greeter appears to be useful to many people.

Or, should we find a radically and philosphically different approach to
introducing our users to features and such?   I kind of think a "Did you
know...?" icon in Main Menu might be more psychologically eye catching.

Or maybe, we should do a "Tip of the Day" concept of some sort (which I
also tend to ignore and turn off.)   I don't know.  :-)

Bryen
>

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