unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martín Soto <donsoto@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Jul 7, 2009 at 11:22 AM, Praveen <tgpraveen89@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> You are right and hence the only sane way of solving the problem seems to
> be to give user the control to seta  global do-not-disturb mode when he
> needs it and logging the messages that he misses.This has several
> advantages such as
>
> 1. No need to predict anything as predictions go wrong a lot.
> 2. Since user is in control there is less uncertainity.
> 3. The do-not-disturb mode is useful in many situations apart from
> fullscreen apps. Say i am writing a document in openoffice and it is very
> important and i must not be disturbed in any way. Then i simply set the
> do-not-disturb mode. Voila. 1 setting many uses.
>
> And there are no disadvantages of this solution which i see.
>

I see a big one: you can easily forget activating the do-not-disturb thing,
or deactivating it later. For example, unless you're a very experienced
speaker, you're likely to be nervous before starting a presentation. This
increases the probability that you forget that little detail of blocking
notifications... until that very personal message from your wife pops up in
front of the audience, that is.

Now, your argument about predictions going wrong is true to some extent. I
don't think we'll be able to find something that works 100% of the time. But
this is no reason to say that we should forget about it completely and let
the user do the whole work. Of course, guessing correctly is difficult, but
this is precisely the hallmark of good UI design.

That said, I don't think that an explicit do-not-disturb mode is a bad idea.
Sometimes, as you point out, people will want to stop all interruptions
because they're under pressure or something. But this, of course, doesn't go
against the idea of having the system do the right thing whenever possible
and without user intervention.

Cheers,

M. S.