Recent KDE poll

[Anne Wilson]

This is the summary of results that I sent to the KDE usability grou:

No. of replies: 70

Application questions:

Classic menu:  
22 people use Classic exclusively or almost exclusively.  One person uses it 
occasionally

Of dolphin users:
6 people use Favorites and Recently-used about equally.

31 people use Favorites exclusively or almost exclusively.
1 other uses it frequently, 4 use it occasionally and one never uses it.

6 people use Recently-used as their main launch point.
3 people use it frequently and 13 use it occasionally.  4 people said they 
never use it.

2 people routinely use kickoff search.

krunner or alt-F2 is used almost exclusively by 3 people, while 1 person uses 
it frequently and 1 person uses it occasionally.

3 people are running Lanceleot

1 person uses panel icons + katapult.

1 person uses cairo.

1 person uses only desktop icons.

Personal details:

Only 22 people were prepared to give personal details.  I asked about 
occupation, skill level, and also whether they fitted into the age groups 
<25, 50-50, 50+ to see whether that was significant in working practices.

One was a 16-year-old student, who rated his skills around 5/10.

Of the rest, all but one were in, or retired from, technical occupations, of 
which 4 were directly concerned with computing.  10 were in the 25-50 group, 
and 11 were 50+, of which 8 were retired.

The remaining one person listed manual trades as his skills, and has recently 
set up his own business.

Skill Levels:

Apart from the student, only one person rated his linux skills as low, 
although he has high windows skills.  One said 'reasonable' and 6 
said 'moderate' or 'moderately advanced'.  6 said 'High' and 7 rated their 
skills as 'Very high'.

Comments (in no particular order):

"It's better than the old menu, but I can't add applications to it."

"I changed the sort order.... When Name is in English and Description is not, 
sort order is absolutely weird"

" Attractive and convenient, and much easier to use"

" better organised, but too many mouse clicks"

"maybe both the most recently used items and the favourites could be shown at 
the same time. Maybe with the area of the menu split into halves, either 
horizontally or vertically. However, the space is already quite limited, so 
it might not be the best solution."

"Better than icons on panel"

"browsing is too slow"

"too many clicks and too slow"

"First, I tuned off the hover behaviour on the tabs because that has to be 
about the stupidest thing I've ever encountered. "

"I definitely prefer kickoff to Classic"

"kickoff is too slow and cumbersome"

"I don't like the naming by description, rather than package names"

"kickoff search is great"

"I use Recently-used mainly for documents"

"I clean the recently-used document list regularly" (two people said this)

"I wish that it would resemble the way Gnome's default 
Applications-Placces-System menu works.  That way I could easier navigate to 
all the other tabs besides favorites"  (I didn't understand this one, but 
maybe it means something to you.)

"It also needs to be more easily re-sizable because it takes up far too much 
horizontal screen real estate needlessly."

"The right way for kicker menus to function is the same way app menus should
function, with menu actions taking place only upon a mouse click, never as a
result of mouse hover or mere mouse move. If you don't believe it, try
watching a typical over-40 PC newbie, preferably with a touch or worse of
arthritis in fingers and/or wrists, try to accomplish anything whatsoever
with a mouse. It's pitiful."
*********

As I said earlier, there are no promises that any wishes will be realised.  It 
was clear too that 'one man's meat is another man's poison'.

The team thank all who took part.  You'll be pleased to hear that some of the 
concerns have already been met - re-sizability was one point mentioned.

Thanks again

Anne
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