GNOME 3.16 released
GNOME 3.16 released
Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:38 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523)In reply to: GNOME 3.16 released by robinst
Parent article: GNOME 3.16 released
Posted Mar 26, 2015 12:27 UTC (Thu)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link] (3 responses)
We shouldn't be surprised that the Unity variant of this misfeature was motivated by - that's right - Eclipse! Back when I studied what was then known as "human-computer interaction" (and still have the large text book), the notion of "affordances" - that you can guess what something does by how it manifests itself - was central to the design of a successful interface. Although the "design" crowd loves to shout down anyone who writes code (because we know nothing about usability, apparently), their tendency to neglect the basics should be noted, particularly by those who see a "nifty" new feature and decide to copy what appears to be a "validated" concept for their own project. Having actually watched people struggle with initially-invisible scrollbars, where the people concerned were obviously not part of the select few chosen to "validate" the idea (that audience probably being the instigators of the idea and knowing exactly what to expect), I regard such things as a betrayal of users with less than optimal eyesight and motor skills. When you have to tell people to squint at the edge of one featureless slab on top of another to be aware that there may be more content off-screen (and apologise for having to do so), and then tell them to aim for a tiny area of the screen (and apologise for having to do so, admittedly a problem with conventional scrollbars as well), you soon get the feeling that any testing probably didn't involve a very diverse group of people or involved a lot of projection onto the participants. Usability is a tiresome discipline if done right, which is why it annoys me a great deal when people use the discipline as a way of undermining or rejecting criticism, only for it to be shown that they cut corners and are just using the banner of usability to showcase their "design" ideas.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 22:39 UTC (Thu)
by deepfire (guest, #26138)
[Link]
You just described how I started feeling about the Gnome 3 thing, ever
Posted Mar 26, 2015 22:57 UTC (Thu)
by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946)
[Link] (1 responses)
http://opensource-usability.blogspot.com/2015/03/hands-on...
Has some concrete suggestions.
Posted Mar 27, 2015 17:54 UTC (Fri)
by pboddie (guest, #50784)
[Link]
Sigh! Beyond this "three seashells" fad, before long I fully expect everybody being obliged to swipe from the edges to see essential controls on screens large enough to show them by default, because someone has decided that it is "clean design" or whatever (and because Apple does it that way). When I mentioned that usability is tiresome, I was being serious. My brief introduction to it covered things like properly-controlled experiments and things you'd get in disciplines like psychology - not surprising, given that HCI (as it was known) is multidisciplinary - which generally doesn't appeal to a lot of people. I agree with the author's views on the URL bar. The tendency to withhold that really does undermine people's expectations about how things like browsers work, and I've seen people struggle with that on KDE (where you sometimes need the "gear" menu - soon to be the three seashells, perhaps - to reveal the URL bar). I imagine that he will run his observations by some testers, as he apparently did before, but it might have been better if people had tried to foresee such problems.
The Unity experience
The Unity experience
> it annoys me a great deal when people use the discipline as
> a way of undermining or rejecting criticism, only for it to be shown that
> they cut corners and are just using the banner of usability
> to showcase their "design" ideas.
since I started trying to use it and encountered the wall
of "my way or highway" attitude from McCann et al.
The Unity experience
The Unity experience
A new "three lines" icon replaces the gear menu for the drop-down menu. This "three lines" menu icon is more common in other applications, including those on Mac OS X and Windows, so the new menu icon should be easier to find.