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[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

** Changed in: ayatana-design
     Assignee: (unassigned) => Mike Nagle (mikenagle)

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/762449

Title:
  Dash is visually hard to grasp and browse

Status in Ayatana Design:
  New
Status in Unity:
  Incomplete
Status in “unity” package in Ubuntu:
  Incomplete

Bug description:
  Binary package hint: unity

  Click the application lense to open the application dash. It is kind
  of messy to visually grasp and browse, and finding something is
  challenging (it looks almost like a memory game). I know there is also
  the search bar to find things, but that's not the problem.

  Our eyes cannot grasp too many icons on a row (that's why for example,
  newspapers and articles are often in skinny columns, so that are
  easier to read). At least on my laptop, I see six icons on each row
  which is a lot to handle if you're browsing for something: I believe
  that having 4, maybe bigger, icons would be much easier on the eyes.
  This obviously has its caveats: (a) we would have less suggestions
  upon opening the app dash when the 3 sections are still collapsed; and
  (b) we would need more columns in general.

  For (a) we could have a longer (and skinnier) dash so that we would
  have 2 rows (4x4 icons) for the "Most frequently used" and "Installed"
  sections; for the "Available for download" section, one row should be
  enough. Notice that this has also the visual benefit that if we have
  the dash going down to the bottom, it would be in perfect harmony with
  the launcher.

  For (b) we should still have this longer dash, and in addition
  something like pages rather than scrolling up & down (to have visual
  stability). Also, when expanding a section, say "Installed Apps", its
  icons could take the whole dash space (i.e. only one section can be
  expanded each time, and we could have some button to go back to the
  overview): now after expanding a section, rather than scrolling, we
  could have a couple arrows to move to the next and previous page. In
  this way, the rows are visually still but the content changes, which
  is much (much!) comfortable for the eyes (also given this stability,
  we would remember where things are more easily).

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