unity-design team mailing list archive

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

Den 07. okt. 2011 16:43, skrev gespertino@xxxxxxxxx:
> You value that, but others (like me) tend to be willing to sacrifice
> some minimalism in order to get features more accessible.
> Hidden scrollbars (I have to admit I haven't tried 11.10, so I'm
> talking about the ones in 11.04) make things a little bit slower.
The claim was that nobody is considering normal users and users who have 
large screens. It is a false claim and that was my point. There are way 
too many unsubstantiated claims in these discussions, and they are very 
annoying. Many of these claims are simply due to not having tested the 
assumptions in reality. The rest are often results of misconceptions or 
bad habits. But I completely disagree that your proposals make any 
features more accessible. Quite the contrary; you seem to be clinging to 
the least accessible methods we have in Ubuntu.
> With visible scrollbars you know where they are, you just move your
> pointer and use them. With hidden scrollbars, you have to aim more,
> and sometimes you miss.
And that is why this problem has been fixed, right? But the thing you 
have to aim for, has never been hidden. It's been made smaller, but not 
invisible. And it does not matter where on the scrollbar you place your 
pointer. In other words, your arguments are nearly invalid. However, I 
always felt that the scrollbar should occupy the entire edge of the 
screen. That's the way it's going to be, so it doesn't make sense to 
start complaining about that. To me, this really doesn't matter at all, 
since I've had a mouse with a scroll wheel for many years, and stopped 
dragging the scrollbars so many years ago that I can no longer remember 
when it was. But for those who do, the fix is nice. However, those who 
do not have these expectations of the system, tends to move the mouse to 
the visible scrollbars, which works well in both Natty and Oneiric. So 
this fix will mostly serve old-school Ubuntu users and not newcomers.
> It's impossible to please all, but we're talking about a change that
> affects a lot of users that didn't have any problem with menus and
> scrollbars just like they were, and do have problems with the new
> ones. And the ability to bring them back to the original state is
> missing.
No, that ability is not missing. It just isn'ẗ forced upon users. This 
is a good thing. But if you want the "original state", from the early 
nineties, then Unity probably isn't for you. Unity is not meant as a 
conservative status quo interface. There are lots of other interfaces 
like that. But if you just want to replace the overlays and stop using 
the global menu, then you're free to do so.
> A non issue has fixed created a new issue. I'm all for visual
> cleanliness but not if that means sacrificing functionality. And in my
> honest opinion, both overlay scrollbars and global menu achieve a neat
> visual appearance with a high cost: they take more user attention to
> be used when needed, making common procedures slower.
I have not seen any evidence of that. I've tested it on many 
unsuspecting users now, and nobody have complained about any of this at 
all. From what I've seen in reality, only experienced users have 
problems with this, which is due mostly to bad habits, and that tells me 
that change itself is a bigger issue than the interface. This is a very 
well known issue. I remember when the window buttons were moved from 
right to left. I spent about a week complaining about it, and when I got 
tired of doing that, I spent about an hour getting used to the change.

You're talking about the speed of resizing windows, right? If you do 
have a keyboard, then you shouldn't resize windows by hidding the edge 
and dragging. You should press alt, middleclick and resize. That's far 
faster than you could ever hope to do the same thing by dragging the 
edge. The same goes, of course, for moving the windows. Alt+leftclick is 
far superior to dragging by the titlebar.

The only reason I see to not completely remove the ability to move 
windows by dragging the titlebar and dragging the edge to resize 
windows, is touch screen. If you have a mouse or touch pad, then this is 
the least accessible way of doing these things.

Jo-Erlend Schinstad