unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Chad M. Germann wrote on 30/01/13 07:49:
> ...
>> 
>> 7. Burden of Proof
>> 
>> http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/ From nearly three 
>> years ago. MPT has since admitted this implementation is not 
>> exactly as he detailed. No one has ever denied that. But there
>> is a well-thought out rationale from someone in Canonical aside
>> from Mr. Shuttleworth. Canonical also does proper user testing.
>> Can you also make such a claim or are we to speak strictly in 
>> anecdote?
> 
> I don't see anything in that link about the Global menu vanishing.

Yes, when I first saw that the menus were hidden, I reported it as a
bug. <http://launchpad.net/bugs/732653>

> gobla menu is ergonomically better it vanishing is not. And i would
> love to see a full report of the user testing on the vanishing
> aspect of the menu with information on the users tested. it is easy
> to fudge a test with using the right samples.

Usability testing has regularly shown people having difficulty in
finding menu-only features since 2011.
<https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-April/002970.html>

As far as I know, full results haven't been published for any of the
Unity tests since then, though they have been summarized at UDS
sessions once or twice.

>> 9. HUD HUD was put out as a way for people to keep fingers on
>> the keys in a natural way instead of contorting fingers for
>> shortcuts (I assume). And works for that. But I'll come back to
>> this shortly.
> 
> except for the fact that hud suffers the same speed issues as the 
> dash but that is another topic all together.
> 
> ...

I may be biased because I seldom use the HUD. The first time I used it
seriously was a couple of weeks ago, to find the "Resynthesize"
command in Gimp -- and first I had to use Google to find out what the
command was called! That much at least could have been solved by
synonyms, so I could have searched for "content-aware fill" which is
the Photoshop equivalent. But if I hadn't known that Gimp even *had*
that command, the HUD wouldn't have helped at all.

Now, Mark believes that the more advanced HUD he demoed at UDS will
eventually solve that discoverability problem -- that first, people
will realize that they can and should open the HUD, and second, it
will reveal what functions a program provides, better than menus ever did.

I disagree, though it's a polite disagreement. :-) But even if Mark was
right, that wouldn't help the millions using Ubuntu 11.10, 12.04 LTS,
12.10, or 13.04. And most Ubuntu applications -- even most default
applications -- are developed primarily for HUD-less platforms, so it
will be a challenge to get their developers interested.

- -- 
mpt
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.11 (GNU/Linux)
Comment: Using GnuPG with undefined - http://www.enigmail.net/

iEYEARECAAYFAlELvC4ACgkQ6PUxNfU6ecoz2gCfZcDXL8R4IDX+7v+heCYcEijH
iE8An3FtNL3MjMtsRiINFEIjaJrH6Fw3
=fmrL
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----