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

["Stefanos A." <stapostol@xxxxxxxxx>]

2011/8/27 Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>

Den 27. aug. 2011 19:10, skrev André Oliva:

From my observations of classmates, fellow students and various other users, I see roughly 2 categories of users (putting all nuances aside for the moment):
- Those who do learn a lot by themselves by active exploration, by trying things out to see what happens.
- Those who don't and tend to struggle even with what is being taught to them step by step. They end up barely capable of following a few receipts, but if there is any deviation, they are lost.

If you're trying to tell me a that a student is unable to learn that you
need to move the mouse to the upper-left corner of the screen when
you want to close an application, then I simply don't believe you.

You obviously have never watched a psychology or philosophy major in front of a computer, have you? No offense intended, but I support a lot of systems and there *are* people who are not computer literate and do have a problem with abstract concepts.

We can't make people read the manual, and not everybody has a friend
with past experience they can ask when they're stuck. How else are all
those people going to learn the interface?

   

We are talking about the upper-left corner. The manual you are talking about
is this sentence: "to close a window, move the mouse to the upper-left corner
to show the buttons and click the red one with an X on it". It's not like this is
a very hard study requiring hours of reading. It takes less than a minute to
explain and understand.

How the people you are talking about have been able to use a computer,
is far beyond my comprehension if they are unable to understand such a
simple concept.

Indeed, it's difficult to understand until you meet such people face to face. They do use computers, however, because they *need* to use computers. Some may have been tought on a (paid) course 15 years ago; others may have followed printed manuals ("the complete idiot's guid to ..." and the like). They are not stupid, many are well-educated with good paying jobs, but they do not care to explore a computer and learn about it in depth - they just need to fire it up, fill in an online form and print a document.

To them, printing translates into "click the File menu, select "Print", click "Ok" and wait for the paper to come out. They are people who don't know the difference between the "minimize" and "close" buttons. Tell them to open a new program and they ask you whether they should close all other windows first. And should they meet a program without a File menu, they will call you for help (how do I print in this new Office/IE/Firefox thing?)

I dread the moment I will be forced to upgrade any of them from 10.04 to Unity with its invisible menus and window controls. It's a disaster waiting to happen.

What can I say. Personally, I won't have difficulty adapting to the new system, as I didn't have with the global menus (despite their problems on Linux, where they are window-based instead of application-based) or the "buttons on left" change. However, I know very well indeed that people do have genuine difficulty adapting to these wanton changes. If there is any will left to support such users in Ubuntu, we will have to be a little more careful than dismissing valid questions with "I can't believe anyone would have a problem with this".