unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear all,

after hesitating for quite some time now, i installed Maverick on my
production machines, and it is running like a charm!
Thanks to the everybody @ Canonical for all the great work, thanks to the
entire community for making this possible in the first place ;)

Reliability:
As in the physical universe, not all interaction objects are realiable.
Yet, when a process fails to start, i know immediately that something is
wrong.
The most unlikely thing to happen is that i press a button or switch, only
to be left guessing for a quarter of a minute, whether anything has been
invoked, activated or started by my action.

http://lh6.ggpht.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TH7Lkl4Jd-I/AAAAAAAAByc/ttFY5lOV3cA/ubuntu-10.10-screenshot.png
and
http://lh4.ggpht.com/_1QSDkzYY2vc/TH7Lk9DqKYI/AAAAAAAAByk/w27hJZiRIII/ubuntu-10.10-installer2.png
show dialogs containing "Forward" buttons in the installation dialog, which
show no feedback upon click.

The Forward button should react in realtime when clicked: at the moment
there is no reaction for about 10-20 seconds.
This is insufficient, e.g. because:
* user doesn't know if the button was clicked or not
* user doesn't know if the click started anything or not
* user might click again, to make sure (confirming Forward on the next page
accidentally)
* user is irritated and becomes impatient after the instant interaction
feedback time (~ 0 - 1 sec) is over

Realtime Interaction is the impression of live interaction with a system.
This impression is a model of what we experience as physical reality, it is
easy to model after that symbolically.
Every interaction, input or gesture creates ripples on the surface of the
GUI, just like a finger that touches a "surface" indents the surface or
changes its state.

The simplest way of solving the "Forward" button problem here, is to add
another frame/state to the forward button, i.e. "pressed".

thoughts?