Our contextual inquiry was conducted in order to get a feeling about how, why, and for what an „expert“ with an obscure file managers uses said file manager. This allows us to gain an understanding about the motivation and reasons for using an obscure file manager and helps us with creating user tasks for our main study. The tasks performed with regular file managers (GUI, tabular, .. ) can than be designed in a way, to be comparable with the same tasks performed with an „obscure“ file manager like ranger, via KLM analysis. The whole interview transcript can be found in our seafile folder, while a summary is included below.

The other major topic of this blog entry is the design of our preliminary study, as well as the tasks for it and an outlook on how the preliminary study will be conducted in the coming days.

The contextual Inquiry got conducted with our semi expert Andreas Schmid (he calls himself an intermediate user) to get information about his working environment and usage, of the file manager Ranger. We met at the office of Andreas, one of us was leading the CI, while the other one took notes of the discussion. We had a pool of questions as back up, in case our subject did not have anything else to add or we needed more information about a specific topic. We tried to avoid interrupting the subject, so he could talk freely and only stopped in case we didn’t understand something or needed something to be clarified.

Workflow:

• Window manager (tile based) → I3 → Short cuts to open windows
• Windows are not floating → whole windows is occupied
• Works with VIM bindings → only keyboard based interactions
• Different workspaces with I3, Andreas sorts his program by workspaces
• He doesn’t use the full potential of ranger, he could make his workflow a lot better, but he was “lazy” and did not bother to learn all of it yet, but plans to do that in the future → He didn’t set a mark to move things to the folder yet (e.g. download folder, image folder, … )

Experience:

• Approximately half a year experience in his “toolchain”
• Used VIM as text editor before he switched to ranger (from a video recommendation)
• He uses a cheat sheet at the beginning, to get used to the shortcuts
• Depending on your previous experience, it can take a lot of time to get used to using ranger (did you use VIM, Linux, Shell before?) → he thinks you will need about 3~4 months of learning time to get used to it → but after that time you will be significantly faster
• He tried to use Ranger a lot, even though he was slower at the beginning, because he wanted to gradually get faster over time
• He needed about 2-3 months to use it a bit more efficiently than with the GUI based one
• He was really slow at the beginning, got used to it over time and now is using it fast
• Ranger since September/October
• He thinks of himself as intermediate user and not an expert
• Example: Dennis S. knew VIM before and worked with it frequently, when Andreas S. showed him Ranger, he knew the basic shortcuts and didn’t need as much time as Andreas to use the basic features of ranger (rangers commands are mostly based on VIM)
• He is using similar VIM commands on his Browser as well

Preferences:

• Works in the terminal
• No mouse wanted
• Likes ranger visually
• Managing pictures in ranger is awkward, that’s why he is using GUI based file manager (Thunar) → Thumbnails are nice
• For work purposes he prefers ranger (really efficient)
• For working with text he is only using ranger and nothing else
• Since he doesn’t like to use a mouse, tile-based file manager are the best for him
• He is very content with Ranger and thinks it’s the best suited file manager for him, but it might not be the best for everyone
• It is similar to Sublime and visual studio, but you don’t need to use mouse events for Ranger, that’s why he prefers ranger over them
• He is still using the mouse for basic interactions like browsing or watching videos → keyboard mainly for working
• Another reason for him to use ranger is the ability to have multiple windows open at the same time, all filling the screen → 2 Windows + 2 Terminals → in the past he used sublime for coding with different tabs for files, now he is using the 4 Standard windows (2 Windows + 2 Terminals)

Shortcuts he is using:

• He has a cheat sheet for shortcuts
• Shift+S (Shell)
• Shift+I(Rename)
• Shift+D(löschen)
• Shift+J(Kopieren)
• Shortcuts are showing “autocomplete” suggestion
• Important Keys: Up, down, left for back, right for continue
• Mostly using standard shortcuts, still has some custom shortcuts he created himself
• Regular expressions would work as well, but he didn’t work with them yet

Ranger :

• Left side the parent folders
• Middle to navigate (vim shortcuts, e.g. moving to top with “g”)
• Ranger shows previews of files on the right side (pictures, pdfs, text files, video preview)
• There are a lot of plugins and configs for ranger
• He says he is only using about 5-10% of the actual potential usage of ranger
• Better navigating, “go to point” (you can put a point in your folders to jump there with a shortcut → in config file)
• Config file starts when ranger starts
• Ranger needs a scope, how files are handled
• You can build your own IDE → might be interesting for Informatic students
• You can use your mouse never less (moving “frames”)
• You can “filter” files in ranger as well, but he didn’t use that function yet, he only used a search function so far → Definitely not a software for beginners, you should have experience in VIM and Shell

Other file manager he is using (and his reasons to use them):

• Drag and drop (google, dropbox)
• Managing Pictures, sorting things
• He used the standard windows explorer before, switched to Linux later and then ubuntu and used the standard “Nautilus” file manager
• Afterwards he switched to Nemo, since it had dual panel, but he didn’t use that file manager to its full extend either 

He is still using nemo, but only to manage pictures:

• Its heavily mouse focused
• Thumbnails
• Drag and drop
• If someone else wants to use pc, GUI based file manager is more practical

Aesthetics:

• He likes the appearance of ranger
• Customized his own “ranger”

What does he not like?

• Picture Preview should be better  but might not be the best file manager for such tasks
• He doesn’t know how to use ranger to its full extend yet  if he would spend one day to learn a bit more about ranger, he could use it more efficiently
• He doesn’t want to use the mouse  interrupts the workflow
• Normal file managers are too circuitous

Conclusion:

He thinks that he is indeed faster than working with a GUI based file manager, but feels like the difference is not ground breaking

The preliminary Study

Introduction: (demographical data)

1. What is your name?
2. How old are you?
3. Gender?
4. Working environment? (Office work or more physical work? Whats the key task in your job?

Multimedia knowledge

1. How long are you on the PC/tablet/smartphone in average a day?
2. How experienced are you with multi media devices?
3. How good are you with handling multimedia tools?
4. Which OS are you using and why?
5. Do you know what a file manager is?
6. Which file manager are you using and which other ones do you know?

File Manager questions to esthethics

1. What is your first impression of the file managers?
2. Which one would you want to use? (even if you don’t know the functions, just from the first impression)
3. Do you know any of the presented file manager?

Questions about Filemanager:

1. What are your goals, when you use a file manager?
2. What functions should a file manager have? Which are the key components?
3. What are the pros and cons of your current used system?
4. Are you using shortcuts when using the file manager?
5. Do you know different types of file manager?

Before the main part: Let the subjects do the ATI (Affinity for Technology Interaction Scale) for a better estimation of their IT knowledge.

Main part: After every task let them fill in a short review how hard the task was (especially paying attention to the learning effect, on GUI based file manager e.g. since the task will get easier the longer the subjects work with a topic).

Standard Tasks:

1. Copy
2. Move
3. Edit
4. Delete
5. Search
6. Open
7. Switch window
8. Sort
9. Create new folder and file
10. Write something in the file

Combined tasks:

1. Looking for pictures with a certain date form a pool of files
2. Look for files with the same name in different folders and compare their creation date
3. Search for specific pictures in a folder and copy them somewhere else
4. Check if there are hidden folder/files in that folder
5. Open a text file, find and edit a specific part of the text
6. Find a specific file in a folder structure
7. Create a new .txt file and write a sentence
8. Find and delete all PDF files from a folder
9. Create a new folder, rename it and move all videos into it
10. Take all pdfs and images and compress them to a .zip file

After mainpart:

1. Which FM did u like the most?
2. Would you use a different FM than your “current” one?
3. How did you like each individual FM?
4. What would you improve?

Conclusion:

1. Would you use a different file manager after our interview? Why?
2. What additional features would you like to see?
3. Could you imagine using a terminal based FM in the future?
4. In which situtations would u prefer a terminal based FM over a GUI based one?
5. Which FM is appealing the most esthetically?

Results and outlook

As the preliminary will be conducted tomorrow after the publishing of this blog entry, the results and their implications on the main study will be included in the next blog entry.