unity-design team mailing list archive

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 5:47 PM, Sam Hulick <samh@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On 2/20/14 2:35 PM, Levan wrote:
>
> On 02/20/2014 17:45, Evan Huus wrote:
>
> On Thu, Feb 20, 2014 at 6:26 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> wrote:
>
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> Sam Hulick wrote on 18/02/14 23:57:
>
>  From a design standpoint, I have to disagree with multi-color tabs.
> For Ubuntu it would be a step backwards, IMO, in trying to achieve
> a cleaner, more modern look, which I know is one of their goals
> lately.
>
> It's a good exercise, whenever tempted to describe an interface as
> "clean" or "modern", to try being more specific. ("Modern" in
> particular is a kind of fallacious appeal to novelty.)
>
> One specific problem with multi-colored tabs is that they would
> often be the most colorful thing on the screen, while being one of the
> least important things on the screen.
>
> My suggestion would be to thicken the borders and/or shadows
> between tabs to make them more distinct. Or possibly dim all but
> the selected tab. In your first screenshot, it's visually
> difficult to tell at a glance what my current tab is. There needs
> to be some way to call out that tab.
>
> This is "Difficult to distinguish which tab is selected"
> <http://launchpad.net/bugs/762349>. It's not a problem for Radiance,
> where inactive tabs are darker. I don't know how it could be fixed for
> Ambiance, where the active tab is already nearly black. Mockups welcome!
>
> In the development version of Ambiance (running the latest 14.04 dev
> version) the tabs are white and the active tab is nearly
> indistinguishable even to my relatively good eyes. See, for example,
> the screenshot in comment #14 of bug #762349. Simply darkening the
> active tab (or adding an Ubuntu-orange highlight stripe or something)
> is quite feasible and would alleviate much of the problem.
>
> Evan
>
> Just Like I mentioned in my first post I think we should make colourful tabs
> something like this
>
> http://i.imgur.com/w2iNzJj.png   or http://i.imgur.com/0KvwSmO.png
>
> because It takes me more time then I want to spend on my tabs.
>
>  Sure it might not look great but I will take productivity over looks.
>
>
> "Sure it might not look great" - That's not really fair to the general user
> base or overall design goals of Ubuntu. It should and can look great and
> still be highly usable. But that's the challenge of good UI/UX design, isn't
> it? :) I'd say if people insist having colored tabs, make it an option, and
> one that's not activated by default.
>
> Evan: I don't think darkening the current tab is standard. Computer users
> are used to seeing things light up when active, not the opposite. Just a
> couple examples:

That's fine, but then inactive tabs should be darkened. Right now
they're *all* bright, which is just awful.

> Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/1JnmWHX.jpg
> Thunderbird: http://i.imgur.com/GzcDajA.jpg
> OS X Mavericks: http://i.imgur.com/Ju5Pkcz.jpg
>
> An important aspect of UX is keeping in line (to some extent) with what
> people find familiar.
>
> -Sam
>
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