132470 - Usability issues with Download Manager

Status: VERIFIED INVALID

Description

[rudman]

Upon downloading a doc and seeing DM for the first time, I thought there were
several significant usability problems. At the very least, there are some
genuine UI bugs.

Issues as I see them:

1. I opened an attachment from Mail, and the DM appeared on top of the doc I
opened. No way to turn DM off. It appeared unexpectedly. (I heard there will be
a prefs panel for DM---maybe that will remedy this...what will the default be?
The DM as is could be confusing to users if it appears by default. I had the
impression of, "What is This Thing??")

2. The "buttons" in the UI need to be more clearly defined as buttons. The
buttons as they currently appear look lilke column headings, which in fact
appear right below the buttons themselves.

3. There are missing dividers between some of the buttons (between "Launch File"
and "Show in Explorer," e.g.). 

4. Why is Properties greyed out? And Cancel? And what would Cancel do, anyhow?

5. "Show in Explorer" is confusing...as one may have IE on a system, though
presumably Windows Explorer is meant. Why even have the button?

6. Not clear what "Remove from List" really does. Does it go beyond "Remove from
List," like, remove from the temp folder? Help content is needed here. Perhaps
the UI should include a Help button.

7. "Launch File" should perhaps be renamed as "Open File" (one can launch an
app, but launching a file sounds weird). 

8. The default columns don't seem optimal. And discovering/displaying the
additional columns wasn't easy. I can't seem to display more than 5 columns. Use
of "Source" could be confusing, since "View Source" is elsewhere in the UI.
Maybe "From" or "Origin" would be better.

Comment 1

[Blake Ross]

1: There are prefs, Navigator > Downloads.  But that will be off in tomorrow's
build. We're going to take more time to hash this out.

2: Really a toolkit problem.  Same situation in Bookmarks Manager. I have a bug
about adding icons to them...

3: That's not bug, launch and show are pretty related. They're also grouped
together in the progress dialog.

4: Properties is enabled for in-progress downloads. It will be enabled for
finished too.

5: I suppose we could word it like it is in the progress dialog, "Show File
Location." That's equally confusing to me.

6: Cancel cancels the download but leaves it in your list (one of the advantages
of a download manager is seeing everything you've downloaded, finished or not).
Remove removes it from the list. This is pretty basic functionality of a
download manager. I think the problem here was making it appear by default too
soon (without getting some of the kinks worked out).  I think users who have
used download managers before will understand ours pretty easily.

7: This is how it's labeled in the progress dialog too, if we're going to change
it we should change it everywhere.

8: All the column display/resizing issues are because download manager is
currently forced to use a deprecated xul widget. It can be converted to the new
equivalent, outliner, once an nsbeta1+ dependency is fixed.

Comment 2

[Blake Ross]

Please file issues separately that don't already have bugs and need to be reported. 

Comment 3

[Wesha]

v.