Re: [Ayatana] Unity2D -- wow! (And hidden window buttons)

[James Jenner <james.g.jenner@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 27 August 2011 12:11, Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

You don't present a single argument. In what way is it confusing? Since
the buttons are always in the upper-left corner, you can't miss them. And
you need to learn that once, just like you need to learn that you can click
on the File-label in order to present a menu. Because that is not "intuitive"
at all, but people have still been able to learn that it will open a menu when
clicked. People aren't stupid and it is important to respect that and provide
a user interface that is comfortable to work with. The less clutter,
the better. And since it is completely impossible to click those buttons
when the mouse isn't hovering over them, there is absolutely no need
to display them all the time.

I agree with you in regards to people learning the behaviour of the application, people are not stupid and they will learn how to do certain activities. This is partly the building of the mental model and partly muscle memory. 

However I disagree with your comment "since it is completely impossible to click those buttons when the mouse isn't hovering over them, there is absolutely no need to display them all the time". I don't agree because hidden options are hard for new users to learn. How do they learn about the hidden activities? How are they reminded how to do the hidden activities? A better comparison would be with keyboard shortcuts that are not advertised via menus. How do people learn about them and how do people get prompted to assist in recalling how to do those activities? Scroll bars are another good example.

Of course the actions for a window are generic to all platforms, and I would have to agree that a user would search for the controls. Though it's also possible that a user would not think to move the mouse over the border to try and find hidden controls, just like some feedback where people get confused by the changes in the scroll bars. I think while simplifying the User Interface is a good thing, I think over simplifying it to the point that a lot of the user interaction is hidden and not obvious is a bad thing. The less infrequent the interaction, the bigger the risk of a large cost to a user when they try to do an infrequent activity.  Just because an interaction isn't frequent doesn't mean that hiding how you do that interaction is a good thing.

A lot of these changes have a big impact to different groups of people. To me there should be some investigation of users who are novices to computers (none or virtually no experience with windows), experienced with windows on a daily basis but not 'power users', power users of windows. This is of course presuming that a lot of take-up of ubuntu is either people with low end hardware and/or not a lot of money or are from a windows background.

James Jenner.