Hi Silviu,
It still suffers from having too many intems in one window. I know of a study saying that any list of stuff should have not more than 7 objects in it, in order to be easily "scanned" by humans.
This comes form epxerienced about the human short term memory, which revealed the result, that humans can recall 7 +/- 2 chunks (a chunk is a piece of information like single letters or meaningful, short combinations like FBI). I have some amendments to that: * these studies are usually done in a laboratory with limited distraction. In a real-life environment people usually recall less than 7 +/-2 chunks. * when you use something several times you also encounter some form of recognition, which makes it easier for you to detect some items (if the items remain in the same order, of course :-)) * in my opinion active recall is not as vital to a list design as something else called serial search. This means, that each item is scanned by it's own, until the user finds the item he is looking for.
Having a window chock-full of icons doesn't feel right. It reminds me of the old Windows control panel. When it first appeared everyone would spend 1 minute finding what they wanted, because they had to look at every icon.
Which refers to a problem in serial search :-)
We have to have at least a two level structure, like it's now in YaST.
The issue that is important here is, that different kinds of users are grouping their items differently and would look for the same item in different places. This is a challenge we have to face.
Because of this, a Favorites section is a very good idea.
Good point.
Also, we are used to YaST, we know what it does. But new users might find it confusing that there are two "control centers": one is KDE/Gnome control and the other one is YaST. How should someone new to Linux get the difference between KDE Control "Internet and Network" and "YaST networking"? How is this someone even supposed to know there are two of these, doing different stuff?
Maybe we can split them into "personal settings" (KDE/GNOME control centre) and "system settings" (YaST control center)?
To do the right thing for usability and to keep the mindshare of having YaST, maybe the YaST modules should be fusioned with KDE control, but have distinctive icons, so the users know those are YaST modules.
Which leads to the questions: what about people using other desktop layouts? Cu, Martin -- Martin Schmidkunz User Experience Specialist martin.schmidkunz@novell.com +49 (0) 911 740 53-346 ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ----------------------------------------------------------------- Novell, Inc. SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready http://www.novell.com/linux -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org