The "Reset" and "Erase" items are confusing. The first time I saw
the "Reset" graphic in the background dialog, I thought, "hey,
cool, I can make my background black and tiled with the word Reset
and this arrow" so I dragged it onto my desktop and	nothing
happened (since I hadn't customized the desktop	background
before). I swear on my life that this is a true story. Other
engineers have described similar experiences	to me.	I also wondered
for the longest time what the "Erase" emblem meant - would it erase
the file? would it mark the file as one that should be erased
later? I know others have experienced similar confusion. 

I think the problem with both of these elements is the in-band
signalling. The dialog tries to make them look distinguished, but
the fact remains that they're lumped in with a bunch of very
similar looking things in a window labelled "Drag a background tile
to an object to change it" or "Drag an emblem to an object to add
it to the object." This sends a strong message of adding rather
than removing something in both cases.

I have no suggestions right now for how to improve this.



------- Additional Comments From darin@bentspoon.com 2000-12-12 11:08:51 ----

The redesign required to make this better doesn't seem worth our time for 1.0.

I also find the "special magic objects" interface for these operations to be
clumsy and confusing, but the task of convincing others of that alone would be
too much time to take right now, I think.

One thought is that we should have "Reset Background" and "Remove Emblems" menu
items available for all the places you can apply a bacgkround or emblem. The
downside here is we add even more interface elements, potentially making both
features even more confusing and the size of menus even larger.

Leaving this P5 instead of deferring it immediately in case Andy can think of an
immediate simple improvement. Otherwise, it can be deferred.



------- Additional Comments From sullivan@eazel.com 2000-12-14 09:16:59 ----

One small change that might help make this feature clearer is to change the text
at the top of the window as follows:

Current:  "Drag a pattern tile to an object to change it"
New:	  "Drop a pattern to change an object's background, or
	   "reset" to restore the original background"

At top of "emblems" page
Current:  "Drag an emblem to an object to add it to the object"
New"	  "Drop emblems on files and folders, or "erase" to remove all emblems"

The only problem with this solution is that there isn't room for this revised
text in the current layout, so the layout would have to be tweaked somehow.



------- Additional Comments From don@eazel.com 2000-12-15 09:32:12 ----

Batch move all 254 PR3 P5 bugs to 1.0.1.




------- Additional Comments From mailhot@enst.fr 2001-03-04 09:32:12 ----

Me too thought reset a kewl background:))

But this poses other ui problems :

* internationalization,
* reset widget hidden whenever the user scrolls the window (will happen more and
more as the background list grows)
* reset behaves like a button but doesn't look like one

I'm sure if you ask about this widget on nautilus lists you'll have no problem
finding scores of users which made the same mistake/don't like this thing.

Please do not wait too long before redesigning this, this can be a killer if a
reviewer looks into it.



------- Additional Comments From eli@eazel.com 2001-03-26 11:11:42 ----

QA Assigning to self.



------- Bug moved to this database by unknown@bugzilla.gnome.org 2001-09-09 20:48 -------