Usability issues
Tommy
few days ago it struck me that I have never seen her use the "activate-
on-process" functionality. Only the "activate-on-flash"-thing.
Therefore I suspect that this great piece of functionality is a little
bit too hidden away for it to be useful to most people.
Of course one person isn't much of a sample group, so I have asked my
buddy Joey over at Omg! Ubuntu! to run an article for me, where the
readers (quite a few of them use Caffeine) are asked to explain how
they use Caffeine, and if they don't use the automatic activation, why
not. It's not the perfect usability study, but I figured it's the best
thing we've got. With a little luck, it might give us some idea of how
we can make it easier for people to understand how they can make using
Caffeine even easier. Because in my mind, the fact that you only have
to configure it once (for each application, sadly, but there's nothing
we can do about that) and then forget about it, is the best piece of
functionality we've got.
The article isn't up yet, but I suspect it will be up soon at
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk
Brad Smith
and good design at the top of our priorities list.
Brad
Isaiah H
Brad Smith
ago, so it should be a little easier to debug that now.
Brad
Tommy Brunn
around 35 responses. Most of them haven't been all that helpful ("I just
click the thingamajiggy"), but there are a few nuggets of gold in there.
----------------------------------
"I usually do then is I just press the cup instead of going by the time,
less clicks and it's a lot simpler, but then I forget to unclick it most
of the time. Perhaps a cool thing would be to set a default time chosen
by the user, I just came up with that but i would be neat."
"What I don't like is that the last features [Activate-on-process] is
unpolished. I would rather see a search-able list of installed
applications and the whole process thing (including recent) moved to a
separate tab."
----------------------------------
There are also a couple of comments that touch on other things, but that
could also be useful:
"ANY application that is using full screen mode - Never while in full
screen mode have I wanted my screen to switch off.
[...]
While downloads are active - how many times have you queued up a list of
downloads to come in, only to come back a hour or two later to discover
you PC has been drinking decaffeinated coffee and fell fast asleep -
then you have situations where some refuse to resume downloading - such
a waste of time.
Copying a large list of files - I set off my PC copying thousands of
files, go make coffee to keep myself awake and when I return my PC has
conked out AGAIN - I have to wake it up and this throws off the
calculated time remaining as well as annoys the hell outta me.
During Video Conferencing or Live Chat - There you are talking away and
zzzzz - your PC is asleep on you.
While running a Virtual machine that is doing something inside the VM, I
set my VM to do something to find the Host OS has gone bye bye on me."
"Perhaps a cool thing would be to set a default time chosen by the user,
I just came up with that but i would be neat."
----------------------------------
The suggestion that appeals to me the most is somehow having a
searchable list of installed applications. The problem is, I have no
clue how to separate packages from applications. We wouldn't want to
have a list of 16000 items to have to wade through. If we could somehow
get around that, I think it would be a great way to go.
It seems that the reason so many people don't use this feature is
because they just don't know about it. Perhaps we should somehow
separate the preferences and the list of processes to activate for? Or
remove the autostart option and rename the preferences item "Configure
auto-activation" or something?
Here's the link to the article, in case you haven't seen it yet:
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/06/how-do-you-use-caffeine-app-not.html