unity-design team mailing list archive

[James Jenner <james.g.jenner@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 27 August 2011 12:11, Jo-Erlend Schinstad
<joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

>
> You don't present a single argument. In what way is it confusing? Since
> the buttons are always in the upper-left corner, you can't miss them. And
> you need to learn that once, just like you need to learn that you can click
> on the File-label in order to present a menu. Because that is not
> "intuitive"
> at all, but people have still been able to learn that it will open a menu
> when
> clicked. People aren't stupid and it is important to respect that and
> provide
> a user interface that is comfortable to work with. The less clutter,
> the better. And since it is completely impossible to click those buttons
> when the mouse isn't hovering over them, there is absolutely no need
> to display them all the time.
>
>
I agree with you in regards to people learning the behaviour of the
application, people are not stupid and they will learn how to do certain
activities. This is partly the building of the mental model and partly
muscle memory.

However I disagree with your comment "since it is completely impossible to
click those buttons when the mouse isn't hovering over them, there is
absolutely no need to display them all the time". I don't agree because
hidden options are hard for new users to learn. How do they learn about the
hidden activities? How are they reminded how to do the hidden activities? A
better comparison would be with keyboard shortcuts that are not advertised
via menus. How do people learn about them and how do people get prompted to
assist in recalling how to do those activities? Scroll bars are another good
example.

Of course the actions for a window are generic to all platforms, and I would
have to agree that a user would search for the controls. Though it's also
possible that a user would not think to move the mouse over the border to
try and find hidden controls, just like some feedback where people get
confused by the changes in the scroll bars. I think while simplifying the
User Interface is a good thing, I think over simplifying it to the point
that a lot of the user interaction is hidden and not obvious is a bad thing.
The less infrequent the interaction, the bigger the risk of a large cost to
a user when they try to do an infrequent activity.  Just because an
interaction isn't frequent doesn't mean that hiding how you do that
interaction is a good thing.

A lot of these changes have a big impact to different groups of people. To
me there should be some investigation of users who are novices to computers
(none or virtually no experience with windows), experienced with windows on
a daily basis but not 'power users', power users of windows. This is of
course presuming that a lot of take-up of ubuntu is either people with low
end hardware and/or not a lot of money or are from a windows background.

James Jenner.