unity-design team mailing list archive

[Hans Heintze <hansheintze1@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 03/01/2012 11:57 AM, nick rundy wrote:
> Is there a good reason to require the user to have to click "See more 
> results" when opening the Applications Dash? Especially when users use 
> dconf to disable the display of "recent" and/or "available" apps, why 
> not display all apps by default?
>
> I was taking a look at the Windows 8 Consumer Preview to see how they 
> handle application display and they have a similar setup where user 
> taps a shortcut and the "Applications Lens" shows up. Except Windows 8 
> displays all apps by default with functional scrolling via PageUp & 
> PageDown.
>
> It is great that adding PageUp & PageDown functionality to the Dash 
> has been green-lit by Mark. But what is gained from limiting display 
> of installed applications when a user goes to the Applications Lens 
> (especially when the "available apps" section is hidden)?

This is a good question to ask, and one that I don't think design has an 
answer to after the introduction of the new dash home.
Now that the dash displays recently used apps/files from initiation the 
presence of the recent section in the apps lense becomes pointless 
redundancy. The only part that isn't functional overlap is the ability 
to expand this section to take up 3 rows. Due to the fact that the apps 
in the section change frequently finding the app you are looking for 
here depends on little more than sheer luck. It is my understanding that 
this is not how Human computer interaction is supposed to go.

Assuming that apps for download is kept in future versions of unity 
despite usability testing, the section would not be an interference if 
all apps were displayed. I can only imagine it being used after some 
text refinement has taken place, bringing it to the top of the page (I 
cannot imagine a user wanting to search for an installable app using a 
query that would return more than two rows of results).  Perhaps my 
imagination is limited here because the few times I have attempted to 
use this part of the apps lense to search for an app no results are 
returned, even when searching for an application name directly.

I hope Canonical design or at least Shuttleworth notices this 
redundancy, so we can have a simpler unity for 6.0 and beyond.