unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

The founding values of Ubuntu stand until today, foremostly represented in
the product's name:
"Ubuntu" translates roughly to "the belief in a universal bond of sharing
that connects all humanity" or alternatively to "humanity towards others". ¹
So the inevitable truth about Ubuntu is that it is meant to be
human-centered.
Keywords here: Human, Sharing, Unity.


Human Unity through Sharing

"Unity" is alive, i'm using it right now to write this email.
Unity means that entities connect into a bond, which exploits the diversity
encapsuled within its individual members through an evolved policy of
sharing.
How can "Unity" become more Human-friendly? By making Sharing easier.
The design efforts targeting an even easier to use interface, based on
simple human gestures and apparent interaction paths that are obvious enough
to be remembered easily seem to be the way to go.
As mpt² pointed out in a way already, heuristics are quite near the core of
what design and development do. "Heuristics" aka bringing things in closer,
if we need them often.

What i would love to either experience as a user now, or talk about as a
design discussion participant, would be extremely short, obvious, apparent
interaction paths to sharing something with another human.
The most surprising point here being, that there still is no Place, Lense or
Prism (i guess they're all just buttons or "apps" to the user) offering me a
simple finger-tip friendly overview of human beings i like to contact
frequently.
In other words: we users have no superfast heuristics for connecting with
each other. This makes Sharing more difficult, and all the talking about a
social desktop or humanity towards others drowns in a recursive spiral of
what we call "interface design". We had a design for a "Places>People"³, it
was already implemented. Perhaps the noun "Places" is incompatible with
action i.e. interaction, which is better represented by verbs, maybe that's
why we still don't have this "button" in Unity.
But Unity, the way i'm trying to explain it here, is not complete in Ubuntu
without the People.

I know there's a lot to be discussed in here, more important issues, stuff
that is directly implementation related, but here's a low hanging fruit that
has already been implemented, and it's simply a "button" away.
What's up with that?


¹ https://help.ubuntu.com/6.06/ubuntu/desktopguide/C/about-ubuntu.html
² https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/msg01845.html
³ http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/11/unity-place-people-update/