unity-design team mailing list archive

[Tony Pursell <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 2011-06-04 at 23:55 +0200, Ed Lin wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 11:24 PM, Tony Pursell
> <ajp@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > Ok, I can understand that, and I also know that you can use the arrow
> > keys and Return/Enter to select a Window, but it took me a long time of
> > experimenting to find out what to do.  Possibly something that a naive
> > user would not be able to find out.  The real problem here is what do we
> > do to help a user in those 'what do I do now' situations.  I get the
> > feeling that users really love Unity when they know what to do, but hate
> > it when it just looks at them without giving any clues.
> >
> > I don't know the best way to tackle this, but making things a bit more
> > obvious is one of them, and that is the merit of numbering the windows.
> >
> > Another way would be to have a sort of 'information mode', maybe toggled
> > on and off with F1, that could print on screen 'You can select a window
> > by clicking it with the mouse, or select a window with the arrow keys
> > and press Enter or Return'.
> >
> 
> I think by just having a highlight around the currently
> hovered/selected window in spread view we'd make this a lot more
> obvious to the users.
> 

+1 for a highlight around the selected window.  Currently there is only
a subtle difference.

> Some kind of keyboard hinting would be great too. The obvious way to
> put keyboard shortcuts in Unity is: the menubar! It currently does
> nothing in spread view....

Not true, I'm afraid.  Applications that use the global menu have their
title and, if hovered over, their menus shown on the menu bar when they
are highlighted.

Tony