how to design a usable desktop

[error27]

Here is my desktop:
http://cs.bemidjistate.edu/ddcarpen1/scrn.jpg

It's not perfect but there are a lot of things to it that I have considerred carefully.

The most important thing is to be able to start applications quickly. One thing that make enlightenment by itself different than windows is that it doesn't have a "Start" button. Instead if you click on blank space then a menu appears.

If you click with the left button the menu is short if you click with the right menu it is larger. 95% of the time I find that I only need applications from the short menu.

Fitts law says that you can click things easier if they are large and nearby. Thus I put the the applications on my "short list" in order of most used to least used. (I need to revise my menu a little now actually. :P)

An offshoot of Fitts law says that pixels on the edge and especially in the corner are easy to click because you can just throw your mouse in the right direction without worrying about going past.

Saddly, the windows start button is not actually in the corner. It is 1 pixel off the corner so it is hard to click.

One thing that you can notice about my borders (Eterm is an exception) is that it has a tab at the top right corner. That means that my background (almost) always shows through in a 7 pixel collumn on the left side. Any time I click on this collumn I get a menu.

Recap: My collumn is right against the edge and it is far larger than the windows start button. Also my menus are more organised. I don't log out very often so that's on the far end.

With Enlightenment you can configure the borders of the windows to behave how ever you want. The theme I use, cyrus, has the top menu configured so that if I left click on the top border it raises the window. If I right click on the top border then it lowers the window to the back of the screen.

Normally, when I'm not taking a screenshot the window I'm working on covers the entire screen (except for the collumn, of course). This means that my top border is right against the edge of the window.

According to Fitts law that is a very easy place to click. So when I want to switch between applications all I have to do throw my mouse up there and right click followed by a left click. By raising and lowerring windows I can quickly cycle through all the open windows on my desktop. This is really fast because of Fitts law and I like it better than ALT-TAB because it lets me fully see what each window is instead of just a title.

Mac users would say that the top part of the screen should be used for the file, edit, etc menu bar but I know shortcut keys so this isn't necesary for me. :P Windows, on the other hand, completely wastes this top edge of the screen.

It took me a long time to figure out how to fit LICQ and gkrellm into 1 border to leave the other side free for my menu. This would be easier if there was a horisontal version of gkrellm or LICQ that I could put along the bottom edge of the screen.

For a while, I tried to not use gkrellm but I found that I'm an addict for this type of information. If you notice I'm getting 70kps and I'm using 45% of my cpu. Gkrellm has helped me a lot about my computer and I'm a bit of a geek. :P Also, it appears that I have 1 email that I haven't read.

I chose the smallest LICQ theme I could find and I configured the border to be small also. LICQ and gkrellm both start automatically when I log in, but I have to log in manually to icq (2 mouse clicks).

It looks like my iconified windows are in the bottom right hand corner of my screen. (They are the apple and the monitor icons down there.) Unfortunately, my icons are actually a few pixels from the edge. I haven't been able to position them by the true edge.

I don't change XMMS much so it's not next to an edge. But it's still only one click away if I need it.

Because of my "lower window" function gkrellm, LICQ, XMMS, and my iconified windows are always directly under my current application. So to access them I have to right click on the top edge and then they all become visible.

With windows you can't cover over the bottom bar so all that space is wasted unless you use a "hide away" bar. This is a bad solution since Fitts Law says that people hit the edge all the time, even when they don't mean to. This makes the bar pop up when you don't want it to.

That's pretty much it. My user interface...

I have been a bit hard on windows but they are not the only people to make user interface mistakes. They are just the user interface we are most familliar with and so I used them as an example.

[Nekopa]

Cool post. But what is Fitts Law, and where can I read about it?

Lee

[error27]

Fitts law is about what things you can click the fastest.

Here is the definition: http://www.usabilityfirst.com/glossary/main.cgi?function=display_term&term_id=265

Basically large and closer things are faster. Thing on the edge seem larger because you can overshoot and still hit.

Here is a fun quiz to see how Fitts law applies in life: http://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.htm
(the quiz is biased towards apple because the guy who wrote the quiz also helped design the apple UI)

I'm glad you liked my post. I'm thinking of writing another couple posts. One comparing windows, kde and gnome file "open file" widget and one talking about enlightenment menus vs the start menu. I'm becoming sort of fascinated by this kind of stuff. :)

[RTFM]

Nice. But your screen resolution is small..

[X_console]

I'll move this to How I Did It.

[X_console]

Re-opened as you requested.

[error27]

thanks very very much X_Console.

I really do want people to tell me what they think about their desktop and how mine could be improved. To me useability is much more important than mere looks (http://www.linuxnewbie.org/cgi-bin/ubbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=7&t=002266).

If it means anything to you X_Console, I gave you a 5* rating for your kindness. :)

[Nekopa]

Hey error,
you might find this an interesting read.

IUI Article (http://www.sourcemagazine.com/csm/Forum1/HTML/000052.html)

Hopefully it will not start a flame war :p

Lee

[error27]

Thanks for the link Nekopa, that was an interesting read.

I think the author is being too generous when he says that "Linux was designed by geeks for geeks." I would say that the way he wrote the control panel was far better than the way it was originally. Both for geeks and non-geeks.

The sad thing is that most people don't think twice about the UI of software that they use or write every day.

For example, when I want to configure a gnome panel there are 3 different configuration tools. To change the color of the panel I had to use 2 different tools. It took me a long time to find the second tool to do the configuration.

The author talks about the new "Start" menu in XP. I have barely looked at XP yet so I don't know what changed. I have always hated the win9x "Start" menu. It is a completely haphazard mess. It's sad that it was ever copied into Linux.

From the article it certainly does seem like XP has brought a lot of UI improvements to windows. :)

Personally I find some of the changes in windowsME very annoying. The "hidden menu" options are just a pain. Stuff in Office seems to move around so the menus look different everytime.

Hopefully we can copy the good and ditch the bad stuff.

[Nekopa]

Exactly.
Linux is in a good position for the desktop, because of the heavy developement involved, to use the good stuff and ditch the bad stuff. It is nice to see someone not completely bashing windows, but realizing that there are some good ideas in the interface, which can be used elsewhere.

I still don't like some of the cutesy graphics that winXP defaults to, but, that is the good thing about skinnable and themeable (sp?) desktops. You can *change* the graphics. Its the underlying functionality which is most important.

That is one of the main reasons that I like Slackware install. It is all text based, so it doesn't *look* pretty, but it has been the easiest distro (for me) to install. Clean and simple. Plus, I get frustrated when use use a graphical install, clicking away happily with the mouse, and when you first try to run X it says, "mouse not found" :p

Now, do you know of anywhere where someone is trying to integrate a graphical interface with a command line interface? I find my self using the old midnight commander a lot in a terminal inside KDE because I can mouse around directories, but quickly type "mv foo foo.old" if I need to. It works for me. It would be nice to see if someone is trying to meld the best of both worlds, rather than saying "Only mouse!" or "Only keyboard"

Lee