unity-design team mailing list archive

[Colton Allen <webpope@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm referring to the "installed" library for those confused on that
account.  I've formatted the email to make it easier to follow.

*What is pagination?*
Pagination is the sequence of numbers assigned to the pages of books,
newspapers, or blogs.  Pagination can also exist (in an iOS fashion) as a
series of dots or icons.

*Why paginate instead of scroll?*
Memory chunking, experience, and load times (or the perceived load time).

*Memory Chunking*
Who can remember where an app is in their unity library based solely on the
amount of scrolls needed to reach its location?  Who can remember where
their favorite iOS app is based on what page its on?  Would you prefer to
scroll through an ebook or flip the pages of your kindle?  Humans break
down information into chunks to better understand information and, more
importantly, to quickly understand it.  These chunks can be books,
chapters, pages, paragraphs, etc. literally anything we can do to break
down information into more manageable chunks we do.

This concept isn't exclusive of Ubuntu.  Apps I use semi-frequently can be
difficult to find if a large array of icons confronts me.  There are things
we do to combat this (filter results and alphabetical listings) and they
work very well but the question shouldn't be "is it good enough" the
question should be "how can we improve" and more importantly "how do we
provide an *Ubuntu Experience*".

I'm willing to devote a near infinite amount of time to Linux but for the
consumer at large that time utility is vastly reduced.  If my girlfriend
can't open unity and find the app she's looking for within the first few
moments - we're done.  Its not that Windows or Apple is any better, its
that they're more familiar and that we must compete in a disadvantaged
position.

Pagination allows us to chunk our memory.  Firefox is on page two, chrome
on the first, virtualbox page five.  If we don't know the page of a
particular app the option to filter still exists and the alphabetical
sorting allows us to make some sort of prediction of where the app might
be.


*Load times*
My laptop is relatively powerful but its not exactly snappy when it opens
unity and scrolls through my library.  Regardless if unity is optimized,
the user will still manage to have 22 tabs of facebook and 19 libre
documents open and hogging resources.  Making unity resource light (without
compromising design or function) or presenting the illusion of lightness
generates a more positive user experience.

Consider this, when we go to view our apps we load everything at once.  In
a paginated context we load page one first, page two second, and maybe hold
off on loading pages three and four.  We've cut out half the apps that
would have been loaded and instead are saving those resources for when the
user needs them.

What if the app I want is on page eight.  Why should I have to load pages
two through seven?  In a scrolling system its required.  In a paginated
system I can skip all the unnecessary and proceed to what I want in a
quick, efficient fashion.  Forcing the user to move their mouse an extra
inch is a burden; forcing the user to scroll through 120 apps is criminal.


*The Ubuntu Experience*
More of a summation than an argument.  The Ubuntu experience is worth more
than the thousands of hours of work that has been put into this project.
 The Ubuntu experience is worth more than being open source or free.  That
ethos can contribute to the experience and certainly won't hurt Ubuntu but
the Ubuntu experience has to be that of perfection.  Things need to be
easy, they need to be fast, but, most importantly, the pieces need to fit
together as though they were never apart in the first place.

Thanks for reading and long live Ubuntu!


Hopefully I've done this properly.  I'm a mailing list newbie so lets hope
I didn't waste a lot of people's time :P