Group 1

A read-only copy of the Google document with the original formatting we used to take notes is available here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kYZqre2lMKwcYTJ9TchWdgq_pElawF5180wOY4oKeSo/edit

Cosimo Cecchi

Fabiana Simões

Jasper St. Pierre

Friday afternoon we took a tour in various departments of the Largo City Hall, and we interviewed five users of the deployed GNOME infrastructure.

FINANCE

Mrs. B had a dual monitor setup and she used a lot (10?!) of workspaces (rooms), which she used for switching between applications (mostly ~1 application per-workspace). She had a “job” workspace, which had spreadsheets on the primary display and a SAP accounting app on the secondary. She really needed the dual display for this reason (to keep SAP side-by-side with Calc for copy-pasting content between the two). She also (on a separate workspace) used an old Motif app to access an IBM mainframe for the public water system, which despite being ugly, she liked a lot because she could just type and interesting results would pop up (in a text-based interface); it was interesting to her the fact that she could just type a fuzzy string, not necessarily an exact match, and still get useful results out of the mainframe system (type addresses or names). She daily needs to deal with a number of different spreadsheets/word documents in Libreoffice, and she used the “Windows” menu in the menu bar of Libreoffice to switch between them. She didn’t use a file manager at all, and she opened all the documents she needed from the file chooser in Libreoffice directly (there was no distinction for her between a file manager and a file picker). She deals with different files every day, but she does not keep a strongly hierarchical file system structure. She seemed to be unaware of what folder structures are and how they work, since she doesn’t use them for finding files; she instead had an ad-hoc organization system, similar to folders, by using the underscore as a delimiter: “yf_taxes_2012.odt”, where “yf” stood for “yearly finance”. She didn’t use the desktop at all.

Mrs. C also had a dual monitor setup and she also used workspaces as a way to switch between applications (1 application per-workspace). She used the context menu on panel launchers as a way to switch between different windows of the same application. Her daily job also involved spreadsheets together with a custom accounting application, and the dual monitor setup helped her in the same way as we observed for the first user. She never uses keyboard shortcuts. She is used to find files using the “Recent files” dropdown list within Libreoffice - which was a pretty huge flat list of file paths and she didn’t seemed bothered about scrolling and inspecting it all the way through. When she couldn’t find the file she wanted in this dropdown list, she’d use Beagle for looking for it by the name of file. The only use she makes of the desktop is to receive the weekly city newsletter, which automatically appears on the desktop on mondays for her. She didn’t use a file manager normally, but she would use it in a special case: whenever she wants to save an e-mail to disk, she would open a Nautilus window side by side with Evolution and drag it in a directory from there - it was convenient for her because that way the email is automatically exported as a PDF file. She never maximizes windows and tended to keep them one over the other, so she could always have a sort of an overview of the windows she had opened. She was pretty comfortable with taking long paths to achieve her goals, even if it required switching between multiple windows (e.g: opening Beagle from within the main-menu - type “beagle”, enter, click it, open). She used the visual clues on the avant-panel, like the triangle and the counter over the icons, to be aware of the applications she has open. When she needed to get to a folder she knew where it was, she preferred to type in the path relative to her home directory rather than navigating there with mouse (“it’s faster this way”)

RECREATION

Mrs. A had a dual monitor setup. She used her primary display for the Recreation system and her secondary display for Evolution and Tomboy (which she always has side-by-side). She is not comfortable with switching windows and she didn’t use workspaces at all. When asked, she said that she rarely resizes windows manually - with the only exception of the Tomboy one, which she does resize all the time to avoid vertical scrollbars to appear if possible. Her setup was “fixed”, with the same windows in basically the same position over and over. She didn’t like keeping many applications open at the same time, because it “cluttered” her screen and covered the base applications she is interested in, but despite this, she never maximizes windows - because she wants to see everything that’s going on. When asked, she admitted she carefully reads all the notifications and the dialogs that appear on the screen, even though “it’s not something all people do”. She really enjoyed the Evolution notifications for new emails, but overall felt a little bit concerned whenever a notification popped up - “oh, what is happening now?”. She used Tomboy a lot, often as a manual replacement for the calendar, since she finds it uncomfortable to switch between the different Mail/Calendar Evolution panes - she always wants to see her email on screen and keep up with it. When asked if she has any annoyances with the software she used, she said that one of the things that bother her most is that sometimes Tomboy “disappears”, which turns out it’s actually crashing...but she didn’t get angry about it, seeing that as something that eventually happens anyway. The other application that she often needs is Firefox, but since she doesn’t want to keep stuff visible on screen that she doesn’t use, she usually approaches it as a one-shot thing - open firefox, view a page and then immediately close it. She didn’t use the desktop at all, since both of her screens are covered with the fixed layout of applications she daily uses.

COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT

Mr. S had only one monitor. For his job (stormwater management), he uses Bentley, a CAD-like enterprise application, which runs in a windowed Windows VM. Mr. S is very attached to the file manager and usually try to find files based on its location within the file system. He uses Beagle very rarely, in situations where he doesn’t know where the file is located. He said he feels comfortable navigating through folder structures he created, but that it feels weird to deal with folder structures others created. For example, the folder structure for his department have been changed by lots of people, so he’s trying to organize it so he can find the files “again”. Mr. S really enjoys using the MIME helpers, especially for printing files (“I know that’s the file, so why do I have to open it for printing?”). He was the only one who maximized windows as part of his normal workflow; he didn’t feel that he needs to see all the windows open on screen at the same time, because he knows how to interpret the clues on the bottom panel (e.g. the arrows and the counter icons), which he also uses to switch between windows of the same application. He only uses one workspace and is comfortable having all his applications there, just switching between them.

Mrs. Q also had only one monitor. For her job, she mostly uses Libreoffice and Evolution. She uses the file manager as a starting point for her work, navigating through the folder structure to find the documents she needs to use/view. One action she often performs is to have two Nautilus windows side-by-side, so she can copy files from one window to another by drag-and-drop. She felt confused by the fact that she had multiple “default” location to save files, because of the way files are organized in her department, so some files would end up in a personal directory and some others in a shared directory, and some in a third personal folder, which was an obsolete location for her home directory. When asked why she still kept files in the obsolete directory, she said it would have been cumbersome to select all the files, and she was worried that those files might not be present in the updated location or somewhere else (she had no way to know), and that she would have lost her data if she deleted those. She completely ignored system notifications. However, she really enjoys the Evolution notifications for new emails. She says she tend to read those, but she wished they were more visible because often she missed them (“I wish they were red”). She used the workspace switcher on the panel as a way to minimize all windows. As other people, she never maximizes windows and she only used the desktop for pictures of her family, wallpaper and the weekly newsletter. She kept a macbook on her desk, for using internet or for personal stuff.

Below, we try to summarize the information gathered during the interviews into a set of observed evidences; for each piece of evidence, we then extract some patterns we believe inspired the user behavior.