unity-design team mailing list archive

[Luke Benstead <kazade@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 19 April 2011 18:24, Mitja Pagon <mitja.pagon@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> ----- "Matthew Paul Thomas" <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>
>> It does. In the videos I watched of Charline Poirier's user test two
>> weeks ago, of the eight out of ten people who could find the hidden
>> menus at all, seven of them discovered the menus while mousing over the
>> close/minimize/unmaximize buttons in a maximized window.
>>
>> They then concluded that the way to access menus was to hover over the
>> close/minimize/unmaximize buttons, and then move sideways. This was very
>> slow, and didn't work at all in unmaximized windows.
>>
>> People were much faster at using LibreOffice's menus, which are not yet
>> integrated into the global menu bar by default.
>>
>
> The question remains. Why, despite being a definite usability regression, is
> the menu still hidden? Who makes this decisions and why can't they accept
> the fact they are wrong in this case?
>
> Cheers,
> Mitja
>

These questions really need answering, You don't need to be a
usability expert to see there are very real problems with the
panel/menu implementation in Natty. The frustrating thing is that we
could revert either the merging of the titlebar OR the global menu
(keeeping merging for maximized windows) and come out with something
reasonably sane.

If even MPT thinks things are broken then why are we continuing with
the current mess? You think Apple or Microsoft would ship with
something as ill thought out as the current panel design?

I thought we were supposed to be bettering OSX? All I'm seeing in the
panel is OSX plagiarism mixed in with our own essence of usability
WTF.

Luke.