Last Sunday I set up an online survey to ask you a few questions about how you use your Mac OS X Dock, and what features you’d like to see in Next Dock, the new dock/launcher application I’m working on. More than 400 of you have replied (thank you!), and I thought this was a good time to post some results. Please note that the survey is still open, and if you’ve not responded already then I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I’ll run through the questions in order below, giving the results for each one along with some of my own thoughts on the outcome. Note that all percentages are of the total number of respondents (just over 400 at time of writing), even when I break a group down. So, for example, if I say that 90% liked biscuits and 70% liked chocolate biscuits, the 70% is also of the total sample – it’s not “70% of 90%” (which would be 63% of the total). This makes it easiest for everyone to understand the numbers.
How regularly do you use the Mac OS X Dock?
- 79% use the Dock “very often”
- 94% use it at least occasionally
Given the fundamental truth that most people will tweak or customize their system relatively little (pretty much going with the default settings for most things), and further given that the Dock does several different jobs which are all fairly fundamental to using your Mac, this result doesn’t surprise me in the least.
Is your Dock always visible?
- 66% keep the Dock visible at all times
This one surprised me a little bit, because I strongly believe in keeping the Dock hidden until needed, but I’m not in the majority. Most of you have it visible at all times. This tells me that Next Dock should most certainly allow auto-hiding, but that the initial default setting should be to have the dock always visible.
Do you use the Magnification feature of the Dock?
- 61% never use magnification at all.
- 6% use it occasionally.
- 33% keep it enabled at all times.
Magnification is a thorny issue; many of you really hate it. I personally have it switched off permanently, and more than 60% of you do too. Is this the sign of a failed feature, something which is good for marketing but not for actual use? Maybe.
For Next Dock, magnification (as the Dock does it) seems not to be a critical feature, but we do need at least something to help distinguish icons from each other at small tile-sizes.
Approximately how many items are usually in your Dock?
- The most common number of apps in the Dock is somewhere between 15 and 20, but there are many of you with twice that number (or even more).
- The vast majority of items in your Docks are apps, often with 1-3 Stacks or folders.
- A significant minority of you count the Finder as entirely separate from your other apps. Many of you wish you could remove it (and the Trash) from the Dock, notwithstanding your views on running apps belonging in the Dock.
I don’t want to remove the Finder or Trash from my Dock, but generally these results reflect my own situation perfectly: I have 17 apps, my Downloads stack and the Trash in my dock.
Do you often minimize windows into the Dock?
- 39% minimize windows at least occasionally, but only 11% do so often.
- The vast majority avoid minimizing, instead managing their windows by hiding apps, using Spaces, or a combination of the two.
This one initially surprised me, until I thought about the fact that I never, ever minimize windows into the Dock – because it’s such a horrible experience. There’s no ready way to get them back without mousing around, you can’t minimize many without serious reducing the tile-size of the rest of the stuff in the Dock, and they’re too small to really distinguish from each other. Ugh. I use Spaces, and regularly hide apps I’m not using, to help manage my windows.
The numbers say that minimizing windows into your Dock is even less important to you than the under-used magnification feature. This de-prioritises mini-windows for me.
Do you often use the contextual/right-click menus on Dock items?
- 77% use right-click menus at least occasionally; 25% do so often.
This stunned me. I avoid using the mouse whenever possible, so I almost never fiddle around with contextual menus on Dock items; the only command I use even semi-regularly is to force-quit an app I’ve launched by accident, or which has frozen up.
Nevertheless, 77% is a big number, so clearly contextual commands for dock items are pretty important to you.
Do you often use the Trash icon in the Dock?
- 71% use the Trash icon at least occasionally; 42% do so often.
Another revelation for me. I occasionally glance at the Trash when my Dock is temporarily visible, but I never drag things into it – too imprecise, and too much chance of accidentally dropping things into the Dock beside the Trash, or elsewhere. I do my deletion via the keyboard.
More than 7 out of every 10 of you do use the Trash icon occasionally, and about 4 in 10 do so often. So, even if it’s optional and removable, Next Dock should have a Trash icon.
What resolution is your monitor?
- Resolutions are large; at least 1440×900 (easily the most frequent resolution) in almost all cases, and commonly 1920×1200 and more.
- Minimum was 1280×800.
- About 20% are using multiple (almost always 2) monitors.
Plenty of room for docked items, then. I currently have a 1920×1200 and a 1440×900 side by side here.
Handling running apps which haven’t been explicitly added to the Dock
- 72% believe that non-docked running apps should be shown in the dock until they quit.
- 19% believe these apps should be shown elsewhere on screen until they quit.
- Only 2% believe non-docked running apps should not be shown.
- The remaining 7% mostly agreed with the majority, but often requested that non-docked running apps be separated in some way from the actual docked apps; this was usually a strongly-held opinion.
The most common response to this consisted of saying that non-docked running apps should be in the dock, but then complaining about the effect this has on making the permanently-docked items not be in a stable position. I sympathise with that completely.
Clearly, Next Dock must show non-docked running apps by default, but I’d like to make this optional – and to allow separating them visually from the permanent items. This gives a halfway house between the OS X Dock we’re all used to, and the slightly eccentric behaviour of the NEXTSTEP dock in this regard.
Behaviour when adding items to a dock which is already full (i.e. the full width or height of the screen)
- 80% believe that docks should make room for new items by reducing the size of existing items.
- 9% believe that docks should add new rows/columns to make room for new items.
- 1% believe that existing items should be replaced.
- 2% believe that it should not be possible to add new items when the dock is full.
- The remaining 8% was divided between expanding the Dock to another screen-edge, making it scroll, or allowing it to be categorized/subdivided in some way (paging like the Dashboard’s widgets bar, for example, or growing tabs, or automatically grouping its items together).
This is another one that initially stunned me, but then I thought “what else can it reasonably do?”. The issue of fitting new items into a one-dimensional dock is really tricky. Furthermore, given that the tile-size must be user-configurable anyway, it seems sensible to take the scaling/resizing approach by default.
That said, I do want to offer other options for overflow. One respondent asked for Oscar the Grouch to appear and steal the new item, hiding it in the Trash, but I think I’ll reserve judgement on that one.
Would you desire the ability to create multiple docks?
- 81% want only one dock visible at a time.
- 39% want only one dock in total.
- 30% want one dock per space.
This result fairly conclusively says that one dock is enough, which is a little surprising since in a survey about a new dock I would have thought that more people would request as much functionality as possible. We’ll see if we can support per-Space docks optionally. I’m undecided on multiple simultaneous docks (i.e. shown at different edges/areas of the screen).
Have you extensively (i.e. not just a brief try-out) used a third-party dock application before?
- 52% have tried third-party Docks, but only 11% found a satisfactory one for extended use.
- 40% are currently satisfied with the OS X Dock.
- 5% do not believe in using third-party docks.
I expected the figure for those who had actively tried third-party docks to be much lower than this. It’s also sobering that only 40% of you would describe yourself as satisfied with the OS X Dock; i.e. more than 1 in 2 of you aren’t satisfied. That seems like a reasonable incentive to proceed with development.
How would you use a third-party dock?
- 62% would use a third-party dock instead of the OS X Dock.
- 22% would use a third-party dock alongside the OS X Dock.
- 16% would not use a third-party dock at all.
This result speaks for itself. There will naturally be a skew for the respondents (most of whom read my blog and/or follow my Twitter feed), but even so – potentially 84% of you would conceivably use a third-party dock. This is a lot higher than I expected.
Would you desire Stacks-like functionality in your dock?
- 86% want Stacks-like functionality, to give a two-dimensional dock.
- About half of these want to expand and collapse arbitrary further docked items (sub-docks), and half just want to see the contents of docked folders.
I’ve heard almost nothing but negative feedback about Stacks, so this number came as a surprise. Though, to be fair we’re talking about actual sub-docks (i.e a 2-dimensional Dock which can have further sub-groups expanded from the main set of tiles as needed), so this desire goes beyond Stacks as we have them in Leopard. Clearly we need to have this ability in Next Dock.
How important is it that your dock has a customizable (“skinnable”) appearance?
- 31% say that a customizable appearance is at least reasonably important for a dock.
I expected about 90% of people to say that skinning (visual customization, themes, etc) was very important, but it’s actual most of you don’t care too much. I do want to have at least some customization ability, but presumably it doesn’t have to be too elaborate initially.
How important is it that your dock supports “dock applets”, like clocks, CPU monitors, iTunes controllers, etc?
- 46% say that supporting dock applets/monitors is at least reasonably important for a dock.
Conversely, I expected this to be lower, but then we all make use of badges and other such status indicators on app icons in the Dock right now. To be honest, this is a feature I’d implement even if no-one wanted it.
Comments about the Mac OS X Dock
Now, some general comments you made about the Mac OS X Dock.
- The instability of icon-positions is a serious annoyance to many of you.
- Should fill the entire width or height of its screen-edge, not leaving gaps at the sides.
- Should support grouping/separators of some kind.
- Trash should be removable.
- The 3D default appearance of the Leopard Dock is not popular.
- Stacks should allow drill-down.
- The piled-icons appearance of Stacks is not popular.
- Using docked app icons as drop-targets for dragged files is a common usage.
- Many of you are annoyed at the Dock’s perceived slowness when unhiding itself.
- There’s a pervasive sense of the Dock being reasonably good at several things, but for that same reason not being particularly good at any one thing.
- There’s quite widespread dissatisfaction about how “tied-in” the Dock is with other aspects of OS X, meaning that you can’t use certain features if you’re not also at least having to tolerate the Dock. Examples include window minimization, the App Switcher, an overview of running processes, dock icon badges and status displays, and so on.
I’d have to say that I agree with most of these. The “it does too much, but not enough really well” point is interesting.
Comments about the NEXTSTEP dock
- Most people have never used NEXTSTEP.
- Those who have used it tended to valu the freedom of placement of dock tiles (particularly the allowing of empty spaces in the dock), and the lack of visual distractions.
- It was often conceded that its functionality was very limited, however, and did not scale well (without the addition of an enhancer like Fiend or such).
Again, this pretty much sums up my own view. The NEXTSTEP dock does have a certain elusive quality, though; it’s hard to describe. Something about its aesthetic simplicity, and its feeling of being made of modular blocks. Hopefully I can recapture some of that.
Comments about third-party docks, or docks on other platforms
- The Windows 7 taskbar is popular, particularly with regard to showing applications’ windows and assigning keyboard shortcuts to specific items.
There weren’t many comments in this section, but Windows 7 did come up quite often. I personally do like the display of app windows, and the ability to see them one-by-one, in place and at full size, with other windows becoming transparent outlines. That functionality goes a bit beyond the scope of Next Dock at the moment, but I think it’s a useful feature.
Conclusions
Generally, there does indeed seem to be a market for a new dock/launcher application, assuming it’s done well and is at least reasonably flexible (talk about stating the obvious). We all have our individual gripes with the OS X Dock, but it’s still a sound basis (in some areas of its functionality at least) on which to build.
I want to thank each of you for your responses and (often lengthy) comments and suggestions. Those of you who haven’t responded yet, please feel free to fill in the survey, and you can also of course leave a comment here.
I look forward to sharing more about my thoughts and design decisions on Next Dock as I move forward.
I expected about 90% of people to say that skinning (visual customization, themes, etc) was very important
Really? I think it’s more Mac-like to not have any skinning at all, but have the defaults be *good*. I’ve yet to meet a skinnable Mac app that wasn’t a nightmarish choice between ugly alternatives.
It’s good to see I’m not alone in my dock-does-many-things-adequately-none-stunningly stance, too. Good luck w/Next Dock.
Hi Allan,
That’s very true (re default-done-well being more important). I guess there’s a distinction between “skinning” (presumably extensive customization), and just having some tweakable options. In retrospect, I might have reworded the question to not so strongly imply the former.
“71% use the Trash icon at least occasionally; 42% do so often.”
Well, the icon is the only way to open the trash to look what’s inside before emptying it. So at least for taking a look one has to use it.
Trashing files themselves? [command]+[delete] all the way. Emptying? Add a [shift] (or [option]).
Based on this I’d love to not have to click the icon for browsing trashed files.
Pretty interesting results. Thanks for sharing the details.
Because some of the answers surprised you, it may be worthwhile to take only the roughly half of people who don’t like Apple’s Dock at all and re-run your statistics with only those people’s answers. In other words, weight the feedback by who is actually most likely to want your software.
Good luck!
Just a note regarding the 3D apperance. It’s really grown on me. When you use separators with it it becomes a very clean almost invisible platform for the apps.
If I had to have a non 3D/glossy dock I’d have to go with the one in Tiger. The Leopard one ain’t pretty. The thick rounded corners and too dark background make it seems a bit gloomy.
One other note. I’ve seen an dock app that lets u group items together. It becomes a replacement for a set of icons. For example the CS3/4 suite of apps. Instead of 5 icons it shows just one icon with a contextual menu containing the adobe apps.
I suppose this could be like an “app” stack.
Man it seems like you were surprised or shocked by a lot of the responses. That doesn’t give me confidence.
Hello Matt,
when taking the survey I thought first about the Fiend.app – an original NeXT dock replacement. But I just reminded myself of the NeXTSTEP 4.0 alpha SHELF. That was something like we could use now as we can’t store folders/files on the Finder windows anymore.
Jolly
I was considering the question of the dock and then realised I keep my dock to a minimum purely because I use quicksilver to launch literally everything. So quicksilver combined with some strict spaces app rules keeps most of my system managed. The dock is only occasionally used when I minimise an application to it.
I wrote a keyboard app launcher for Windows (back in ’99) because I hate the Start Menu, and I still cringe whenever I watch someone navigate a complex hierarchical menu structure with the mouse. This app launcher was the one thing I missed the most when I used non-Windows system (so I wrote one for OS X, Quicksilver didn’t cut it for me)
My hatred of the Start Menu leads me to think that the Dock shouldn’t be much more than it currently is, which is a convenient launching pad only for your most-used apps and documents. In my opinion, there are better solutions for more comprehensive app-launching that don’t need to involve the Dock at all. In fact, I think the stock combination of Finder, Spotlight, and the Dock does a pretty damn good job.
Even though I still depend heavily on my keyboard app launcher (which I happily invested a large amount of time to write) I still regularly launch my most used apps and documents using the Dock.
In other words, even though I depend on other solutions for app launching, I think there’s room on my system for the Dock just as it is, in all its simple glory.
What I would love to see, however, is a second dock, always auto-hidden, designed replace the Desktop and hold a large number of documents. That is, it actually contains documents, not just links to documents. I still use the Desktop to hold all sorts of documents and other junk, and there’s just got to be a better way.
like “anonymous”, i’d also like to point out that there’s no other easy way to access your trash. You simply need to click on that icon to open it. but that’s about all the usage there is for this icon :-)
same goes to the context menu. I don’t know who the audience of this survey was, but if that’s mostly developers i guess they use it to force-quit applications. that’s actually the only thing i do with the context menu, cause for everything else it’s just too slow and to hard to figure out. but as for force-quitting, there’s no faster way of doing it. (it’s the first item from the bottom and it’s that in EVERY application)… it’s like option-right-click the icon to kill the app…
Good luck with Nextdock!
Karsten
Regarding the ‘always show Dock option’: Unhiding the Dock is slow. It takes half a second or so which feels like an eternity. if you like using drag and drop using it is simply out of question.
I wasn’t particularly convinced by the design of your questionnaire and wouldn’t give too much on the answers you received. Particularly as you didn’t address compatibility issues at all. The main reason that keeps me from even considering a 3rd party Dock replacement, apart from the general suckiness of existing solutions, is that it’s completely unclear a priori how well it will integrate with the system (and the next system update). How well it will handle things like the Dashboard which seems tied to the Dock.
Because of that I consider your idea a laudable but potentially dangerous endeavour.
P.S. I’m also surprised you didn’t really discuss Dock positioning. To me it seems an essential question in this context. I tend to find vertical space on my screen extremely valuable while horizontal space isn’t – particularly with the wide-screen displays Apple commonly sell these days. Which makes having a horizontal Dock seem silly to me (or at least this makes the autohide option seem more relevant for horizontal Dock). And the vertical vs. horizontal question has strong implications on the icon size you get to see. Which makes this whole point tricky.
P.P.S. Who gives a damn about ‘skins’? Their mere existence usually puts me off because it tells me the developer doesn’t have any taste and doesn’t even try to find a great solution.
I am have a usage pattern similar to Geoff’s. Nothing other than currently running apps in my dock. Well that and about 3-4 stacks.
Hi Sven (ssp),
Agreed re slowness of the Dock’s unhiding animation. I don’t necessarily propose to replace the existing Dock; I don’t believe it’s entirely possible to do so in any non-hacky way. A “replacement” in this context need not remove or disable the original, particularly as the OS expects it to be there.
Regarding dock positioning, I didn’t feel the need to include a question on where people put their dock because I believe that freedom of position is such an essential feature that it’s not even worth discussing. I can’t conceive of a dock that doesn’t let you choose whether it’s vertical or horizontal, and which screen-edge it lives on, and such – so I didn’t think it was relevant ask people which one they’d use.
The amount of mouse use shouldn’t be surprising, it is after all one of only two dominant input devices – the keyboard and the mouse.
One thing that jumps out at me in relation to the high level of mouse usage is the size of screen real estate. Big wide screen monitors means a lot of mousing to get to the dock (ok so having the dock on the left side when I have two screens doesn’t help…).
A solution that dealt with that would be awesome. Firstly, you could have a dock per screen along the idea of one per space.
Or, you could have a keyboard shortcut which popped the dock temporarily under the mouse so there is a fixed (small) amount of mousing no matter where your mouse is, and you only need to remember one shortcut to quickly access all dock functionality.
Perhaps something along the lines of the dartboard menu ui people played with in the 80s, but I think a tiled design will be less freaky to users than a round one.
Re context clicking on the dock: I only do it when I’m on the laptop with the trackpad; since the trackpad and keyboard are so close together, it’s actually very very fast to use the thumb to get the cursor to the dock, and two-finger tap to open the context menu, and then typeahead to get to the choice I’m after, and then enter. (Yes, I’ve remapped right-opt to be enter…)
Re: magnification, I think that the problem is with the defaults. I hate the everything-is-small-and-a-hover-turns-it-into-a-giant behavior, but a subtle magnification is enough for me to have a visual cue that I’m in the right place to click whatever dock tile I’m after.
These results are interesting indeed. I’m always fascinated by how people use their computers, and to hear how people use the dock specifically is particularly interesting to me, as Apple have made such a hash of it in Leopard.
I mainly completed the study because I was interested in keeping up to date with what products you were developing. I’m not a big fan of customising everything in sight – I’ve got too many distractions as it is. And some third party tools are a bit hackish for my liking.
But from the sounds of this post, you may be making something that I’d seriously consider buying and using regularly.
A dock which was fast, could be navigated via the keyboard and had a nice square minimal appearance (I love the aesthetics of the NEXTSTEP dock) would actually start to get me rather excited.
Viva la Dock Revolutione. Or something.
The problem with Magnification is that it only magnifies the icon visually, the actual click target remains small. If you scrub your mouse through the icons, the magnified icons move in the opposite direction of the mouse; essentially, the area where you can click stays the same size as in the unmagnified Dock. It actually feels wrong, as if the icons where trying to escape your mouse if you overshoot them.
So magnification doesn’t help you click on icons, it merely helps you see them if they’re very small, which is not something most people need.
may I suggest you have a look at Workstrip X. Unfortunately it’s no longer under active development, but it had some really nice features, such as built-in preview, pop-up folders, workspaces etc. Also, I think Fantasktik is a nice window-utility. Wouldn’t mind something like that in the next dock.
Just wondering if you’ve made any further progress with your Dock replacement app.
I think most people don’t use magnification because it actually shifts all of the other dock icons around, messing up your spatial memory. One way you might consider resolving this is if the magnification zoomed the icon, but only enlarged the click target vertically so that all the other icons stayed in the same place. There is some amount of space between each of the dock icons anyway, so maybe if you only magnified it to take up that in-between space?
just curious as to your plans regarding developing a new Dock.