Michael Gerstacker via Tails-testers:
> as far as i understand that summary it means that there could be a
> chance for a revise of the applications menu.
Definitely.
> I think its an important part because i think every new user starts there.
> But at the moment it seems pretty mixed and overcrowded.
>
> I think you could mentally sort every item in three categories:
> - pre-installed software (OnionShare, Tor Browser, Brasero, ...)
> - Tails specific things (WhisperBack, Tails Installer, Tails
> Documentation, ...)
> - OS specific things (Calculator, System Monitor, Power Statistics, ...)
>
> Just an example which came into my mind instantly:
> The average user probably dont know that the calculator is built into
> the OS but he can guess that System Monitor is about monitoring the OS.
> That means they should be in two different submenus. One for example
> called System Tools and the other one called Tools.
That's a bit what Windows does with "Accessories" and "System Tools".
- "Accessories" are Notepad, Calculator, and such.
- "System Tools" are System Monitor, Settings, Disk Utility, etc.
> If i know about the limitations in sorting the items i could take some
> time and try to write it down somewhere:)
You can try but I'm not sure it's going to work and I'm really not sure
it's worth the time I'll spend on this (as said earlier, it's not the
best UX possible but people are doing fine checking several submenus
until they find what they want), at least compared to spending the same
time on more pressing UX issues.
- From my experience in usability tests, the most problematic
submenus are "Accessories", "System Tools", "Utilities", and "Tails".
So please stick to them and not touch the other ones unless we have a
very good reason to do so.
The "Tails" submenu has its own set of problems (#5521) but we might
be close to being able to solve them, see the last comments on the
ticket.
At least to me, the more ambiguous of the 3 terms is "Utilities".
Windows has "Accessories" and "System Tools" with a pretty strong
difference between the 2. macOS only has "Utilities" (and not
"Accessories") because it puts some of the "Accessories" in no
particular submenu (eg. the calculator).
Could we get rid of the "Utilities" menu and limit ourselves to
"Accessories", "System Tools", and "Tails"?
- If I understand correctly, these submenus are built from a mix of
hardcoded information in /etc/xdg/menus/gnome-applications.menu, which
comes from the gnome-menus package, and the "Categories" entry of the
.desktop file of each application,
for example /usr/share/applications/gtkhash.desktop.
So we might have to discuss each of the change that we want to do with
the upstream of the app (or of the gnome-menus package) so it would be
important to limit the changes to the minimum. It might not work to
try to change the name of all menus or move more apps to a different
one. We might also succeed in pushing some of the changes upstream but
not all of them
- Right now we can display up to 10 apps in each submenu without
triggering the scroll bar. I'll like to stay under this limit because
the UX would be worse if people have to scroll than if they have to
scan more submenus because of the steering law:
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/steering-law/
We have 26 applications between "Accessories", "System Tools",
"Utilities", and "Tails", that would mean at least 3 submenus still.
--
sajolida
Tails —
https://tails.boum.org/
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