unity-design team mailing list archive

[Thibaut Brandscheid <randaltor@xxxxxx>]

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 4:08 PM, Petko <pditchev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> First a few notes :
> 1. The feature in question is very old ,and a lot of people have their way
> around it .
> 2. Inheriting the info from 1. -> I'm not quite sure how many people (old
> as they may be) have a problem with the feature. What is our representative
> sample ?
>

It would be interesting to have some user testing to see how average people
use the sort feature and where they struggle (if they do).

- Can they sort files in Nautilus by date.
- Can they "fix" a mail app that sorts by-subject instead of by-date (find
a mail send on [date]...).
- Do they understand the functionality of the sort button (one button - two
functionalities: 1. Select the column that should be sorted. 2. The sort
direction).

On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 10:25 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> Before picking up the feature scythe, I suggest trying a less drastic
> fix. Ubuntu's default theme makes hardly any distinction between the
> sorted column and other columns. If the sorted column and column
> header were highlighted, that you had changed the sort order would be
> more obvious, and how to change it back would also be more obvious.
>
Visualizing the current column & sort direction more clearly could be a
solution.
Maybe adding a monochrome arrow before the column name (a bigger one than
the one Nautilus uses) and change the background color to a more lighter
color (maybe a very light orange would be okay too) to indicate that column
[column name] is currently the selected one to sort the content.