unity-design team mailing list archive

[Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, May 25, 2011 at 8:15 PM, GonzO <gonzo@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 6:30 PM, Ed Lin <edlin280@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> With all due respect: I do not think your cases are all that common.

I never claimed the contrary. BTW I don't use Unity and probably never
ever will (I'll spare you the reasons, it wouldn't be pretty).  I just
gave you some reasons why this and that would fit my personal usage
better because that's the easiest to relate to for me. However, that
doesn't mean all the points stated do not apply to a significant or
even the majority of the user base (they really aren't interested in
hardware stats) and everything I post here is always with a full focus
on actual users needs (I'm not sure about your motivations but here
you have mine: I want a great FOSS OS for everyone) and I gave plenty
of reasons why for those the global menu is worse than what they had
before. The only counterargument I heard is Fitts's Law and while I
could only rebut it to some extent (i.e. as far as we can go without
actual usability testing) it doesn't matter because there are more
important issues (like familiarity, discoverability, consistency,
interface stability, distraction, clean separation and flexibility).

I know stuffing panel indicators into the launcher is an afterthought
and therefore very, very difficult to solve from a design and
usability perspective. But just because it's difficult doesn't mean we
couldn't try.


Let's recap:
The majority agrees that the global menu should go, right?
In this case the top panel becomes useless except for the panel
indicators (maximized don't need the panel to put menus into the title
bar).

3 solutions: keep the full panel, keep a partial panel, completely
remove the panel.

Would you not agree the cleanest solution from a high level is
completely removing it?

It makes no sense yet to talk about the concrete implementation of an
indicator area in the launcher if we can't even agree on the first
point. There is really too much back and forth and going in circles
going on in the mailing list. The same issues come up all the time and
I feel like constantly repeating myself :(

Any ideas on the organisational side of things here? Maybe launchpad
is suited better because it forces us to split up the issues into
little manageable chunks but then the "grand vision" is lost.