(Quoting fully and moving to tails-ux.)
intrigeri:
> sajolida:
>> intrigeri:
>>> One issue GNOME folks are aware of wrt. the Overview is that it's hard
>>> to discover for first-time users; I guess it's one of the primary
>>> reasons why we still have an Applications menu. I seem to remember
>>> that there's an extension floating around that displays it on login by
>>> default, developed by folks who wanted to improves things here.
>>> IIRC some GNOME-based distro that's strong on design/UX work enables
>>> this by default. If there's interest, I could look this up
>>> more precisely.
>
>> I think that the biggest problem with the Activities Overview is even
>> more about learning how to get there than about knowing that it exist:
>> it only has a pretty weak signifier on the desktop.
>
> Right.
>
> I'll drop some thoughts of mine and we'll see if I've understood what
> you mean, and if we're on the same page:
>
> 1. Most users won't guess that sending the mouse cursor quickly to the
> top-left corner will trigger something (i.e. opening the Overview).
> So if we dropped the applications menu extension, for first-time
> users, we could not count on this gesture and would instead have to
> rely on the "Activities" button. Then, eventually, while sending
> their mouse cursor to the top left corner in order to click the
> "Activities" button, one will discover some day that clicking is
> not needed, but that's just a bonus.
>
> 2. Neither the "Applications" button nor the "Activities" one are
> displayed in a way that makes it obvious they are buttons in the
> first place.
The "Application" button comes with a ⏷ (downward triangle), which is a
common signifier for "drop-down". The "Activities" button doesn't have that.
> But that does not mean they're equally good: it's
> quite possible that more users will relate to the "Applications"
> wording as "oh, that's where I should click to start the app
> I want", compared to the vaguer "Activities" wording.
Yep. macOS uses "Applications", smartphones use "App" (though Windows 7
uses "Programs").
> We don't know how this would apply to Tails users in a context when
> we display desktop icons (see #3); but we have some data that
> suggests that the "Activities" wording works well enough in the
> absence of desktop icons (see #4).
>
> 3. Displaying a bunch of rather large and colorful icons on the
> desktop tends to make the "Applications" and "Activities" buttons
> (in contrast) less visible, less discoverable, and less obviously
> clickable: these icons suggest the desktop is based on a specific
> design paradigm, while the GNOME Shell top bar is uses another one.
>
> Dropping the desktop icons in favour of an always visible dock,
> that would include our Favorites and current desktop launchers, as
> Ubuntu did, would:
>
> - provide another way, displayed constantly, to reach the list of
> apps: that dock displays, in the bottom-left corner of the
> screen, the same 3×3 dots button that's at the bottom of the
> left-side dock in the Overview. I don't know how much this
> improves discoverability;
>
> - probably make Favorite apps much easier to discover and start:
> even if the user does not easily discover any way to list all
> installed apps, at least they have direct access to the most
> common ones.
>
> 4. In a "pure" GNOME desktop with, the situation is quite different.
> The only displayed UI elements when one opens a session are the top
> bar ones, that is:
>
> - some status indicators in the top-right corner
>
> - the clock in the center of the top bar
>
> - the "Activities" button in the top-left corner
>
> The 2 first items are quite obviously not where one would look for
> applications, so in practice, even if the "Activities" button is
> not a strong signifier, users end up finding and using it
> (according to usability tests I've conducted¹ with 6 people, most
> of them not familiar with GNOME initially).
>
> My hypothesis to explain this observation is that even in the
> absence of a strong signifier, the "choosing by elimination"
> process works well when you are given 3 choices and 2 of them are
> quite obviously not right. I would bet it does not work if you're
> given 6+ choices, some of them much more visible than the
> "right" one.
I agree with your hypothesis though I'd rather not consider the
"choosing by elimination" a good design practice.
> [1] https://people.debian.org/~intrigeri/blog/posts/GNOME_and_Debian_usability_testing_201705/
>
> So my current conclusions are:
>
> - The (relative) strength/weakness of the signifier for accessing the
> Overview is a function of its styling, wording, and perhaps even
> more importantly: of what other UI elements we display by default.
Agreed, except the "more importantly" part. I think that the ⏷ and the
wording are more important that the "choosing by elimination".
> - I would not propose that we merely disable the applications menu
> extension in Tails: if we changed this, and only this, then likely
> we would make it even harder to find out which apps are available
> and how to start them.
>
> - There are two potentially valid options that would allow us to
> replace the applications menu with the Overview, abandoning the
> "apps sorted in categories/sub-folders" concept that most other
> operating systems have dropped already, with a pretty low risk of
> regressing regarding the discoverability of the list of apps.
>
> In both cases, it's probably doable to also rename the "Activities"
> button to "Applications", if we think it would help.
>
> That is, the "learning how to get there" problem seems practically
> tractable :)
I really don't think that the slightly sub-optimal categories of the
current "Applications" menu should lead us to replace it any time soon
because I don't think that the advantages will outweigh the downsides,
let alone the time spent working on this.
--
sajolida
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