unity-design team mailing list archive

[Jo-Erlend Schinstad <joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx>]

Den 27. aug. 2011 05:02, skrev James Jenner:
> 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.

I don't understand that. By moving the buttons to the corner, it is very 
easy
to hit. Hiding the buttons do not in any way impact 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.
Well. How do people learn how to move windows? How do they learn how to
press enter in order to get a new line? There are things you need to learn
when using a computer. Assuming otherwise, is not constructive. People
learn these things because they use their computers.

> 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.
You really think closing a window is an infrequent action? "When a window
is maximized, the buttons are hidden and revealed when you move the
mouse pointer to them". Lesson learned. You talk about over simplifying,
but I think you're complicating things. If you aren't able to learn that
the window controls are in the upper left corner, then you certainly won't
be able to learn how to move windows, open the lenses or mostly anything
else. Also, it is very important to remember that this kind of interaction
is very common on the web, and that it is the most common thing people
use computers for.
> 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.

I assume you're talking about Windows. But why is that so important?
I was born in 1980 and when I grew up, we typed cd to switch directory,
del to delete files, etc. Well, most users don't interact with their
computers that way anymore. We cannot blindly do the same things
because that's how they were done in the early days of computing. Most
people have probably not even heard of Windows. We shouldn't try to be
different for the sake of being different, but we certainly should not limit
ourselves from fear of being different either.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad