Usability Review of OpenMoko GTK+ Applications

[Thomas Wood]

On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 20:32 +0100, Marcus Bauer wrote:
> Hi Thomas,
> 
> thanks for your answer!
> 
> On Tue, 2008-03-11 at 15:31 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > The problem with using the power button is that it is completely
> > unobvious to new users. 
> 
> That's true and it took me a while to figure it out but then who would
> know about multitouch on the iPhone if Apple wouldn't tell everybody? 

True, and I'm not a huge fan of multitouch because of this! It just
seems too fiddly and unobvious to be of any practical use, although I
haven't used an iPhone/iPod touch for more than a few hours so I could
be wrong. I can't imagine anyone using if they hadn't seen the Apple
demonstrations.

[...]
> > Perhaps
> > we need to make it more obvious. How about replacing the new button with
> > edit, and moving new into a menu? Presumable Edit will be used much more
> > often than New.
> 
> For me the New button is more important than Edit. Especially when the
> phone is new.

Ok. I tend to add contacts by tapping in their number into the Dialer,
and then using "Save to Contact", and I've seen a lot of other people do
this too. Which should make sure we can add Contacts through the Dialer
aswell.

[...]
> > > > * Remove communication history page(?)
> > > 
> > > So far everyone told me that this is a cool feature missing on all other
> > > phones. I love it ;-)
> > 
> > Interesting, I guess I rarely look at my call history anyway. You can't
> > do any thing with it, so I don't really see what it's usefulness is.
> 
> In a business context it is often very powerful to be able to say "I
> called you on XXX at YYY and on XXX and YYY". Additionally I would like
> to be able to click on a call and add a note to it.

That would probably make it more useful. The problem I have with this
page is that it doesn't seem to make much sense in the context of
"Address Book", except that in this case you are specifically looking at
the call history of one contact.

[...]
> > I definitely don't want to see menubars! Also, I want a "application
> > menu" button to appear only if the application has a menu. The fact is,
> > some applications are bound to require menus to keep their main
> > interface clear, so we should provide a convenient place for the menu to
> > appear from, rather than having a menubar take up more space in the UI.
> 
> I don't like this in maemo and believe if an app needs a menu it should
> handle this by itself.

Interesting, I guess I just see a menubar as taking up screen space
without adding value for much of the time. Personally I don't mind it
being hidden away in the titlebar.

> Anyway, you are the developer so it is just my input. So far I like
> OpenMoko a lot the PIM applications included.


Well, I'm not *the* developer, but I was one of the original developers
so I'm glad you like the applications! I think there is still room for
improvement and I hope we can encourage other people to start hacking on
these applications too.

Regards,

Thomas

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