Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 5, 2010 15:42 UTC (Fri) by tjc (guest, #137)
In reply to: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland by Janne
Parent article: Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

But people don't always know which button does what.... If the window simply vanished, users can be left confused as to what happened.

Well, maybe the first time they don't know what happened. But if someone clicks a button five times, and the same thing happens every time-- and they still don't know what's going on-- then they have issues that can't be addressed by the UI.

Everyone is confused from time to time, but it usually passes. There are very few people who live in a state of perpetual confusion, so why target a UI at some imaginary, gormless twit who doesn't even exist?

Shuttleworth: Unity on Wayland

Posted Nov 6, 2010 10:22 UTC (Sat) by Janne (guest, #40891) [Link]

With attitude like this, it's no wonder that Linux on the desktop is perpetually stuck at under 1% market-share...

People are not computer-wizards. It might be obvious to you and me how and why computers work the way they do, but rest of the people have no idea. The computer should do everything in it's power to help the user. But every time something like that is attempted in Linux, we get whining about "dumbing down" the UI or something. Only in Linux, complexity is considered a good thing, and helping the user is considered a sign of stupidity.

End result is that Linux on the desktop is something that normal people do not want to use.

And sure, people will learn which button does what. But animations still help. When you have dozen apps in the taskbar, it's useful to have an animation that shows you which of those is the app you just minimized. Sure, you could visually scan the taskbar, but you must admit that animation is a lot faster way to do this.

And there are even studies about this. Researchers set up two functionally identical systems. The difference was that one system looked plain and basic, while the other has nice graphics ("useless eye-candy" as it's called in Linux-community). It was found that people were more productive on the system that looked better. People found the better-looking system more pleasant to use. And that in turn made them more productive. And happy users are a good thing.