On Sun, 2008-03-16 at 10:56 +0100, Milan Bouchet-Valat wrote: > Or we ca say "User Preferences", with this "Administration" will > appear > much clearer. > > If that's not possible, just “Preferences” will do—the word “preference” > > tends to imply *personal* preference anyway. > > > I thought so, but it looks like people don't make the difference between > preferences (personal) and administration (ugly system and hardware > stuff).
I'm not sure that most users would immediately recognise themselves as “the user” – I think that's a word *we* tend to apply to them. So I think that that wording (“User Preferences”) might seem a little bit foreign to some users. …but not problematically so, and if this makes it clearer that these are *personal* preferences then I think this'd be an improvement. > The fact is that we are now turning round. Anyway, we should > make clear whther we need a deeper refactoring, in which case the > Preferences/Administration issue will disappear. I think de-segregating the two is a good idea in general – it's easy to forget whether the setting you're after is global or personal, even when applying lots of logic- and experience-based mojo. However, (how) will it still be clear when one's changing a global setting as opposed to a personal preference? As a quick, rough UI sketch: the Unlock button could instead say “Administration” and open a new sub-dialogue solely for administrative settings (with “Administration” shoe-horned into the title somehow). Or, each dialogue could include a progressive disclosure control (labelled “Administration”) that would disclose the admin settings, all of which would be greyed out until the Unlock button (which would now live *inside* the progressively-disclosed area) was used and, if necessary, the password entered. (I suggest that the admin settings should always need unlocking when entering the dialogue – even if gksudo is remembering the password and it won't need to be re-entered – to emphasise that these options are potent and “a little bit scary”.) I prefer the progressive disclosure method – “new sub-dialogue” is not a nice phrase, and this option would still maintain a clear distinction between personal preferences and admin settings. I also think it's a good idea to show the user what settings they'll be able to change *before* having them enter their password, which is tedious by design. -- Greg K Nicholson -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
