Re: [Ayatana] Fitts Law
- "Matthew Paul Thomas" wrote: > -BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- > > It does. In the videos I watched of Charline Poirier's user test two > weeks ago, of the eight out of ten people who could find the hidden > menus at all, seven of them discovered the menus while mousing over the > close/minimize/unmaximize buttons in a maximized window. > > They then concluded that the way to access menus was to hover over the > close/minimize/unmaximize buttons, and then move sideways. This was very > slow, and didn't work at all in unmaximized windows. > > People were much faster at using LibreOffice's menus, which are not yet > integrated into the global menu bar by default. > http://design.canonical.com/2011/04/unity-benchmark-usability-april-2011/ Is this the testing you were referring to? If so, how come there is no mention of the issues you raised above? Cheers, Mitja ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
Re: [Ayatana] New Unity lens - Contact lens
2011/4/19 frederik.nn...@gmail.com : > > it's quite sexy, indeed! > why not add a mockup for the maximized dash? in that one, you could make it > show search results as large thumbs or "cards", just as Ian suggests above, > and still have the actions on the right. > i'd also swap the positions of "received messages" and "chat", and then > probably think about renaming "received messages" into "history". > thanks for an excellent thread Hi Frederik Thanks for your thought impulses. ‘History’ seems to be the right terminology, and indeed the chat button should be faster to reach. Sorry for the delayed response. It took me some time to think and shape up the idea to fit different screen sizes/dash stats. Also I thought about how Contact Lens could be integrated into Unity in a more typical way -> icon wall. New Contact Lens behavior 1a - non-maximized/small screen size - contact by icon wall: When starting Contact Lens, an icon wall is displayed with typical Unity categories (‘Recent’, ‘Most’, ‘All’), powered by Zeitgeist. Categories are collapsed by default and only showing some entries (less optical clutter). When selecting an icon, the contact information fades/slides in from right to left, taking all screen space. 1b - non-maximized/small screen size - contact by keyboard search: 1b behaves as 1a, except that the contact information will have a ‘search result area’ on the left as long as the search output has more than one result. Mock-up - http://goo.gl/UB64L 2 - maximized dash: If the screen size is big enough I suggest to merge the search and result part. Mock-up - http://goo.gl/Kh1Qm In the end, it’s a mix of Seif Lotfy's original idea and typical contact information - with some useful further action buttons. Thibaut ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
[Ayatana] What are the advantages of an application-centric interface?
In Unity applications and windows largely behave more like OS X while the "classic" desktop is more like Windows. There is a dock which represents applications as opposed to windows. It focuses windows of a running application instead of launching a new window and there is a single menubar per application, not per window. This is what I call the application-centric interface. I wonder why it was chosen as the preferred interface design because I can only come up with reasons why the "old" window-centric model works better: Multiple Desktops: The window-centric interface is a simpler mental model for the user as it is more predictable. No matter what applications are running on other workspaces or monitors a taskbar based interface will always behave the same way. It's less noisy and disruptive because you never get automatically switched to another workspace just because coincidentally another instance of an application is already running there. This particularly applies to such applications as file managers, terminals and text editors that are opened frequently and are used in different "work-flow contexts" say your "admin", "coding" or "personal" workspace. Window Management: The taskbar requires one click to switch to any window in the current desktop, in Unity switching to another window usually requires at least two clicks. Opening a new terminal/file manager window Again, takes more clicks if launcher icon and active application icon are the same. Keyboard shortcuts alleviate this for me but many people never use those. Menubar: The menubar "outside" of windows is probably the most visible aspect of the application-centric design. The main problem here is that 3rd party Linux applications are all written for the "classic" model. It's not just LibreOffice and similar cases though. GIMP and Firefox already have integration in Unity yet it's not perfect: If the toolbox or download window is focused the menubar is empty and keyboard shortcuts don't work. This is nothing that can't be solved as native OS X applications show but my question here, is it worth it? Apart from the netbook user case with maximized windows I can't see any advantage of the global menubar. (If it was speed of access you wouldn't have made hover only.) My question to you: What are the reasons behind moving Ubuntu from a window-centric to an application-centric interface? What are the advantages and are they worth the trade-offs? I want to like Unity, there is much to like about it, the launcher keyboard shortcuts, the compiz integration, the dash, lenses and more but please help me understand why app-centric should be better for me. ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
Re: [Ayatana] Overlay scrollbars
Hi Marco, on touch interfaces, to drag, you are supposed interact directly with the page content. You are not supposed to see the thumb, and hence interact with it. Best, chr On Thu, Apr 14, 2011 at 1:05 PM, Marco Rofei wrote: > New scroll bars look and behaviour as it is in natty today are extremely > hard to use in touchscreen devices were you cannot use mouse-hover > functionality. > > I suggest to extend delay time they use to disappear when mouse isn't close > enough. > > Regards > MR > > ___ > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana > Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > > ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
Re: [Ayatana] Ideas for Unity based on the recent Canonical Design blog post
For me it would be more intuitive, less cluttered, et al, if the dock had a "system" lens, a "favorite applications" lens, and a "current open windows" lens (adjacent to, or combined with, the workspaces lens) ...and then dispensed with the paradigm of instead placing individual launchers for /n/ applications on the dock. For applications I interact with less frequently, I would then go to the applications lens, and for what I use most often I would go to the favorite apps lens (much like I do with the Mint Menu applet right now -- the Linux Mint devs have a much simpler and more usable concept here IMHO). Take the above on its own merits. Now that you've taken the above on its own merits, consider the following ... This would also make room for migrating "system tray" sort of stuff to the instead and getting rid of the top panel entirely, and putting window controls, window titles, and menu bars back into the application windows where they are far more intuitive and usable at any state of window resizing / positioning. On 04/22/2011 08:04 PM, Evan Huus wrote: On Fri, Apr 22, 2011 at 7:12 PM, Ian Santopietro wrote: Welcome to the list! On Apr 22, 2011 4:18 PM, "Evan Huus" wrote: Hi, I'm new to this list so please let me know if I'm out of turn somehow, but I have a few ideas for future incarnations of Unity. I was reading the Canonical Design blog post at [1], and two particular problems caught my eye: - First, many users seemed to have difficulty finding settings. Currently these are accessed through the Applications lens or through the top-right shutdown menu. Neither of these are particularly intuitive, since users don't consider settings dialogues to be applications (even though they *technically* are). The solution that makes the most sense to me is to add a third lens to the default Applications and Files lenses, a System Settings lens. The icon can be the default magnifying glass with a stylized gear in the middle. I'm not sure the best way of implementing it, but it ought to be fairly simple to have it search only those .desktop files which would appear in the System->Preferences or System->Admin menus in previous incarnations. Another question is whether we leave those .desktop files in the Applications lens or take them out: I'm not sure which would be best. The obvious keyboard shortcut is Super-S, which conflicts with the workspace launcher, that would also have to be dealt with somehow. Still, details aside this seems like an intuitive and obvious solution to the problem. - I feel like this solution is on the right track, but it should be developed better. Adding a new lens at the bottom wouldn't solve all of the problems people had with the current system. Which problems wouldn't it solve? The big one I found from reading the blog was that people were hesitant to search for settings in the Applications launcher. I can't imagine them having this problem in a Settings launcher. I feel like I'm missing something obvious here... This is probably one of the areas where Unity is significantly different from the competition. Maybe the best thing to do would be to simply add System Settings to the launcher. If we kept the current system in place, we would keep the supposed benefits of having it that way, and adding the launcher would help people discover them. To be honest, I don't find the System Settings window useful. It lists almost fifty different subcategories in only a couple of major groups, and while the search tool is handy, it's not smart: searching for "wallpaper" or "background" lists no results because the Appearance dialogue doesn't use those words in its name. I would much rather have Settings as a lens rather than a simple launcher to take advantage of Unity's smart searching. Admittedly, searching the dash for those keywords doesn't return the Appearance window right now either, but it would be easy to add many more task-specific launchers to a Settings lens (things like 'wallpaper' which links to Appearance, or 'battery settings' which links to Power Management). Adding all of these right now would clutter the System Settings window beyond any semblance of usability, but with Unity's smart searching and a separate Settings lens I think this would be both discoverable and efficient. The second idea I had was for the bfb and launcher, since there are several usability problems the study revealed with it: - mousing over the bfb to reveal the launcher is unintuitive - clicking the bfb to reveal the dash is unintuitive - people mistook the nautilus launcher as something more, since it has a 'home' logo and is the first launcher by default. I think all of these problems can be solved by a single slightly different design. By default, I believe that the bfb should be just another launcher item with a mono ubuntu logo, fixed at the top like the trash is fixed at the bottom. The launcher bar should extend all the way to the top of the screen (whe
Re: [Ayatana] Ideas for Unity based on the recent Canonical Design blog post (correction)
"This would also make room for migrating "system tray" sort of stuff to the *dock* instead, and getting rid of the top panel entirely, and putting window controls, window titles, and menu bars back into the application windows where they are far more intuitive and usable at any state of window resizing / positioning. ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
Re: [Ayatana] Overlay scrollbars
Actually on Android there are some instances where an overlay scroll bar IS used. For example, when moving through contacts or music albums. This makes it easier to jump to the appropriate entry as quickly as possible. On Apr 23, 2011 12:13 PM, "Christian Giordano" < christian.giord...@canonical.com> wrote: ___ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ayatana Post to : ayatana@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ayatana More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
