[Slapt-get-devel] usability study of gslapt

Sriram Durbha sriram.durbha at gmail.com
Mon Feb 28 22:09:09 EST 2005


hi jaos and others
 i did not get a chance to test the alpha version extensively;
however, here is a brief observation from the  usability  perspective;

1. the menus are redundant; [ which is both good and bad ]
   usually menus provide the complete functionality; but icons provide
only the most frequently used;  for a small application like gslapt, 
it is better to *aim for*  no menus;

2. even in the existing menu, ther are two options which when pulled
down give only one option!! this is not very useful ;

3. may i suggest that description is next in importance to name; so it
be moved next to the name of package;

4. facility to upgrade only the selected package(s)

5. would be great if a view of  packages in  groups is provided along
with a list;

6.  the location and  version info are provided twice ; [ both good and bad]

7. location is with reference to "." but it is not clear that it
refers to  soem other directory and not the current directory where
gslapt was launched from ;

8. i would love to have the packages displayed in a tiered view where
initially [ first tier] you see only high level apps [gimp, cssedit,
open office ] , as an option in the view, i should be allowed to see
the dependencies, etc
in teh second tier, i should be able to see all packages ;
my motivation for htis it, to most users, the abstractin is that of
applications they use; most people dont really care or need to know
all the info about all the packages installed on their system;  i know
most of use knwo what goes in our machien like th eback of our hand,
but im sure in the years to come, more people will use linux and
hopefully slack and its derivatives ; and most of them will not be
like us; they will be general users;  so i would like to have such a
user in mind when i comment on this app;


9. most important!! :)  ; these are just my opinions!! im not a guru
of anything [ except maybe  c/c++]  so kindly consider these my
observations and a seed for discussion rather than flame;  to me this
looks like a gui-fication of slapt get;
instead if we started from scratch to develop a package managemetn
tool with gui only , and happen to use slapt-get for the back end then
im sure we will end up with a different design;

10 . also i hope to be able to get familiar with the code and make
some contributions of my own; in which case, i would really appreciate
if the work is broken into well defined tasks so that i [ or people
like me ] can sign up and commit code ;

thanks
cheers
ram


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