A nice presentation at MIX09 that lets us peek into the usability process that was undertaken in introducing new features in WIndows 7, such as Aero Peek.
I’d like to appropriate some of their ideas and use it for looking at the GNOME shell project and how they’re trying to rework the desktop. It would be interesting to write a little script that people could run that would take a screenshot of their taskbars so data could be gathered as to what exactly people put on their taskbars – much like the Windows 7 team did (at least according to this presentation). Other ideas include checking some gconf settings to see how many workspaces a person has setup, how many panels, what applets, how many windows open typically, maximally, etc.
Next step – write up a little email to the GNOME usability mail list, see if they have any other ideas. There has recently been a new screenshot app making press – Shutter – that perhaps could grab a screenshot of just the panels, rather than the entire desktop, just to reduce noise.