unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, Aug 27, 2011 at 9:08 AM, Jo-Erlend Schinstad
<joerlend.schinstad@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> You seem to have very low opinion of your fellow human beings. I actually
> feel a little insulted.

I apologize, I'm sure that wasn't anybody's intention.

> But this discussion is not useful. The buttons have
> been hidden and even if you think that the majority of people will now no
> longer be able to close windows, because they forget that windows can be
> closed when they don't get a constant reminder, that's the way it is now.
> I feel very confident that people will be able to commit to memory that
> the upper left is used to close windows.

I agree that as far as Oneiric is concerned, the Interface Freeze is
past and the hidden buttons are more or less the way it's going to be.
But that doesn't mean that we can't be looking ahead to 12.04. As I
mentioned in my previous post, I'm personally not sure what the best
route forward is on this issue, but there's no harm in having an
intelligent debate on the topic.

> You're creating very large problems out of nothing. Ubuntu is not meant
> to be an operating system for the mentally challenged, but for average
> human beings. They aren't going to go desperate by the fact that the
> button to start applications aren't green and aren't in the lower right corner.

Nobody in this thread has proposed that the best path forward is
simply to mimic Windows (or Mac OS) just because. However, keeping in
mind people's past experiences is an important part of designing a
user interface. People make decisions based on past experiences, and
those decisions influence how they interact with the interface. I
believe that not taking this into account is a mistake.

> If anything, people should not be given the impression that they can
> learn how to use a computer by exploration. It is an exceptionally bad
> idea.

Why is that a bad idea?

We can't make people read the manual, and not everybody has a friend
with past experience they can ask when they're stuck. How else are all
those people going to learn the interface?

> They do have to learn how to use it. It should be easy to learn, but
> these types of changes does not in any way make a computer more difficult
> to use.

I think what you're saying here is that "Easy to learn != Easy to
use", which I.do agree with. I just think that these changes do, in
fact make the interface harder to learn, because they make it harder
to explore. At this point we're back to the question of whether
exploration is a valid method of learning an interface.

> If you try to make everything obvious, then nothing will be obvious.

We do want to avoid information overload, but window manipulation is a
relatively common action. I think we want to make common actions
obvious, and hide away less common actions to avoid clutter. This is
why I don't have a problem with hiding the menus: they typically
contain less common actions.

> Most people use computers often. They should learn how to use it by
> reading something, not by exploration.

Most people use toasters often. How many people do you know who have
read the manual for their toaster?

Again, we can't force people to read the manual, and in fact most
people aren't going to even bother reading the manual. They're going
to sit down at the interface, and expect to be able to explore or
intuit their way to their goal. Ignoring these people as potential
users seems like a bad idea to me.

> Because even after years of
> exploration, they will not be able to grasp basic concepts, whereas spending
> five minutes on a quick tutorial will give users with experience from other
> systems a good understanding of how everything works.

Manuals and tutorials are certainly more efficient means of teaching
the user, but I disagree that exploration is entirely useless. I don't
have any data to back up that assertion unfortunately.

This is turning into a very interesting discussion of user-interface
design principals. I hope that by the time the 12.04 cycle starts up
we have reached some sort of consensus (even if the consensus is that
we need to do more usability studies before we make a decision).

Cheers,
Evan