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Alex Launi wrote on 02/07/09 09:00:
> 
> On Thu, Jul 2, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Otto Kekäläinen <o...@sange.fi> wrote:
>> 
>> Well, for advanced uses like you and me F-Spot is fine, but for
>> normal home users it is too complicated.
> 
> Could you provide some evidence for this?

In Canonical user testing of F-Spot last month:

*   Five of the six participants successfully imported photos from a
    camera, though one of them used the file manager to do it after
    blatting away a "fatal error" alert from F-Spot. The sixth was
    confused by the main F-Spot window being partly responsive while the
    Import dialog was open, and ended up not importing the photos at
    all, instead unwittingly editing the original photo files on the
    still-connected camera.

*   Both the participants I asked were able to identify the date a
    photo was taken.

*   Two of three participants I asked were able to crop a photo. The
    other could not find the "Crop" commit button because the side
    pane is too narrow by default.

*   Five of the six were able to rotate a photo. The other had the photo
    open in gThumb, where the rotation function is effectively
    invisible.

*   Two of four participants asked were able to burn some photos to a
    CD, but both of them used the CD/DVD Creator rather than F-Spot to
    do so (one because F-Spot had crashed earlier, and the other
    because F-Spot hung when he chose "Export to CD"). Of the two who
    did not complete this task, one thought he had succeeded but had
    actually burned F-Spot gallery HTML files to CD rather than the
    actual photos. The other opened Brasero and chose "Burn image"
    because she wanted to burn some images, and did not understand
    why Brasero wouldn't even let her burn one Jpeg, let alone several.

>...
>> I know tagging is the superior way to file and sort your images, but
>> the case for normal home (and business) users is that they still like
>> to think about their image collections as folders.
> 
> I'm pretty sure this isn't true. Folders confuse the hell out of
> everyone. They only think about them this way because it's all they've
> ever had. This is bigger than f-spot however and needs dealt with at
> the file system/file browser level.

*   Zero out of five participants used F-Spot tags unprompted when asked
    to "put all the photos of the river in a group by themselves"
    (though, to be fair, one of them had given up on F-Spot completely
    by this point). Of the five, one used "Export to" "Folder", one
    mistakenly used "Export to" "Gallery", and two used the File Browser
    (though one of them unknowingly created the folder on the camera
    rather than on the computer).

    The fifth said: "Create a new folder, or something like that ...
    Create Tag? Should I use that? ... I wouldn't know, to be honest. Is
    it in this program, or outside it? You'd usually go to a new file,
    new folder-y thing, wouldn't you. Maybe this tag thing would be
    something to do with it, I don't know." When encouraged to try it,
    he successfully created a tag and used it to categorize the photos.

(I'll be providing these results in more detail to the F-Spot and
Brasero developers when I've finished analyzing them.)

>...
> Let's file some f-spot bug reports :) This shouldn't be difficult to
> implement as the infrastructure already exists, it's just a UI change. Make
> some mockups, file some bugs, and reap the benefits. In the end, we'll all
> be better off.
>...

I helped the F-Spot developers with some design issues at Guadec last
week. But the general issue of one interface being used for file
management including photos, a second inconsistent interface being used
for viewing and editing individual photos, and a third inconsistent
interface being used for viewing and editing collections of photos, is a
usability disaster beyond the scope of F-Spot.

- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/

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