unity-design team mailing list archive

[Conscious User <conscioususer@xxxxxxx>]

> Hrm. whaaat.. 
> Design Communication is essential for the developer community, and for
> the designers to layout the future plans , to co-ordinate the design
> implementation. This part is improving and the design team's blog is the
> start of such improvements.
> 
> This should not be of concern for the end-user. This
> explaining-my-design-to-user communication should not be a priority for
> the design team. Such communications are of little value to the
> end-user, user should never have to read a manual to use the indicators.
> 
> If the design is so bad it needs someone to explain it first , it is a
> design /failure/ .
> We should learn what went wrong and improve it , rather than try to
> explain why the functionality is limited or behaving weirdly.
> 
> If there are such problems of users misunderstanding the indicators and
> resorting to google , it is better to file bugs or bring them to the
> notice of this mailing list rather than insisting on the designers to
> explain it to the user.

Your points would only be valid if all the current usability problems
were caused only by design flaws. But they are also caused by incomplete
implementations.

Take the Me Menu, for example: it is supposed to have broadcasting icons
over the text field, making its purpose more evident. The current
implementation does not have that, and I have not seen *one single
person* who could deduce the purpose of the text field without help.

There is nothing to improve in the design, or bugs to file: the
designers are fully aware that the current implementation is suboptimal,
or the elements it lacks wouldn't be part of the complete specification
in the first place. But it was shipped anyway. And since it was
shipped anyway, the minimum Ubuntu should do out of respect for the
user who's being explicitly exposed to an incomplete implementation
is to be a little bit more helpful than expecting him to Google.