GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 73448
"Start Here" is confusing, need to use a more descriptive term for the directory and vfs folder names
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
To a new user it's not really clear what "Start Here" in the "Go" menu is supposed to mean. It's not clear where "Here" is and it's not clear what "to start" means in that context either.
Seth, any thoughts?
I agree this one doesn't make any sense, but as to what does..? We need one of those clever UI people to help us out on this one.
I'm going to excercise some judgment and mark this notabug. start-here is a gnomeism. It's our equivalent to my computer in windows. start here is a gnomevfs location and is just as legitimate as any other location in nautilus. if start-here is a bad term for this location, than we need to do a major redesign. but bugzilla is probably not the place to do this.
I am going to excercise some more judgement and reopen this. :-) "Start Here" is possibly the worse name ever for such a feature. It is just totally meaningless. If you have a menu saying "Go -> My computer", it means that it makes you go to see what is in your computer, which is a simple concept that makes some sense. On the other hand, if you have "go -> Start here" you are left with basic philosophical questions like "where is Here?", "what do I start here?", "what would I want to start here?" and most importantly, "Why should I go to a place with such a wacky name?".
A usability test needs to be run on this. FWIW, in my two years of using GNOME, I have never heard of this "Start here" business until now. That makes it, IMO, not a gnomeism...but another one of our stupid desires to innovate when it would be much better to stick to common, understood terms and metaphors. This is a bug.
Ettore and Ann: The reason i marked this not a bug is that go => start-here is not the problem, the problem is the "start-here" directory in general. to fix this bug a few things would be needed: 1. a better term for the directory and a new associated gnomevfs vfolder 2. change all references to start-here to the new name: This would include all the .desktop and .directory files and the go menu 3. rename the gnome-start-here icon This basically would amount to an api change I believe, since to make this consistent you'd have to remove the start-here: uri and use the new one instead. I don't think it is possible to make such a large change in the gnome2 time frame. But talk to alex if you really want to make this change. I'm going to change the title to reflect my comments I agree that the term start-here sucks, but this would involve a pretty big change in our design
Belive me, we tried to come up with a better name. But we failed...
It is a gnomeism insomuch as it has been in Nautilus release for a while, though I suspect Ximian hides this feature, or at least does not promote it. But I agree, the name isn't clear, and more importantly does not denote a location. It is a command to the user. That's sort of weird.
OK can everyone take a look at bug 83428, which proposes just removing start-here alltogether... I think this is a good idea, if no one objects i'll just mark this a dupe of that one....
I'd mark it as a dupe. Start-here needs to go.
Marking as dup: the main discussion is on bug 83428 *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 83428 ***