unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jim Rorie <jfrorie@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2010-04-20 at 09:53 +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:

> The notification design guidelines.
> <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines>
> 
> I don't think it's a destruction, so much as a correction. Developers of
> software that runs on Ubuntu are often keen to use an interface
> mechanism just because it's there, regardless of whether it's not a good
> idea. Tooltips, the notification area, and notification bubbles are all
> examples of this. In these cases, consistency can be a bad thing. So
> it's up to us to provide guidelines and suggestions about the variety of
> techniques people can use instead, and then up to the designers of
> individual applications to work out which bests suit their interaction.

Which is exactly the point I was trying to make.  They've removed an API
which was easy for backend programmers to use to create interactions
that were consistent in look and feel. They've put nothing back in it's
place.

Yea, programmers can navigate the whitepaper and design something within
the guide lines, but the reality is most of them don't. So we get a
mish-mash of different looks and feels that the user has to navigate.
Thus they have introduced chaos back on the desktop.


> Notification bubbles were heavily overused before Notify OSD.
> <http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/chatty-applications/> The
> introduction of Notify OSD has nudged developers towards fixing this a
> bit, but not completely. Network Manager is one obvious example that's
> still too chatty.

Agreed, but the solution still isn't a solution.

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