I understand the need to upset people by forcing change in order to make improvements in the long run. However, I will still list my annoyances, although I'm prepared to reserve final judgement for now.
I'm forever getting mixed up between the status menu and the messaging menu. The only thing I really use them for is Empathy, which now seems to be split between two menus. And to bring up the contact list it now takes two clicks (or more often three because I clicked the wrong menu) instead of one.
I don't like to just minimize Empathy or Rhythmbox since that gets in the way of my "working set". As a programmer working on distributed systems I often have perhaps up to a dozen windows in a workspace in each of eight workspaces. "System" stuff gets in the way of my window management. I'd like this stuff to be somewhere distinctly different.
> No competent designer, sitting down to design an operating system from scratch, would say to themselves “I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”.
I disagree with this. I want two different ways, because they have two different purposes. One is my for the working set: stuff that I'm doing. The other is for stuff that's always there, like a new email notification, an IM contact list, background music and the clock. I don't see a problem here.
I think that a notification bubble worked just fine for notifications. You'd have the icon pointed out to you, and then it would be there in the background using minimal space until you attended to it. That's about as unobtrusive as it gets. Grabbing clicks has never been a problem for me, but not being able to see under it has. I'd prefer to be able to close the notification bubble rather than being forced to wait; being able to click through is pointless if I can't properly see through.
Instead I now have an annoying popup telling me that I should update appearing in a separate window that I have to close only for it to pop up again. I understand that this is intended to be improved, but at the moment it seems to keep demanding attention and interrupting me and then it forces me to wait while it loads.
I suppose that the problem is that as an experienced user I know what the notification icon for "updates available" meant and I want it to stay there as a reminder. However, I only want to be interrupted once. At the moment (on Karmic) I get interrupted repeatedly and the only way to stop this is to remove the notification entirely.
I agree that the UI should be consistent. I would prefer if any suitable application had the capability to either minimize to the system tray or to the task bar based on a user setting with a sensible default. The close button should always close it (or if not, the behaviour should still be consistent across all applications).
I understand that some of my complaints are intended to be addressed already, so I look forward to my experience getting a little better, at least. I thank Matthew for the blog post - at least I know that these things are being worked on.
I agree with most of what you said, but I disagree that forcing change to drive long-term improvements is a good idea.
There seems to be a trend to making UIs less configurable and more "consistent" with the app designer's presumptions about how a UI should work. But does this justify sweeping away well-established UI conventions for something new and untested?
If you make the new UI a configurable option, one of three things will happen:
1. People will gradually discover the new UI option, try it out, and if it genuinely does improve their workflow, keep using it in the long term. In this scenario, your improvement will gradually displace the old convention, and you will eventually reach a point at which old convention can be retired.
2. Some people will adopt the new design, but many will continue to prefer the old convention. Here, there is no objective superiority of one solution to the other, and the best direction is to let it remain a configurable option.
3. Adoption of the new feature will be negligible. This might be because the established convention is in fact superior, but it might also be attributable to user simply having entrenched habits. Either way, it implies that the new solution does not have enough of an advantage over the old to overcome what users are accustomed to, and that the established convention is good enough. In this case, you should acknowledge that the change was unnecessary and revert back to the old convention.
This approach allows for UIs to evolve to suit actual usage preferences, and avoids the pitfalls of constantly changing everything in pursuit of an abstract and prescriptive notion of consistency.
The problem with having different menus for different categories is that it optimizes the use case where a person has Bittorrent, IM, music and 10 different things in the background versus a person who only has one.
The person with only one background service will see unnecessary cluttering with different kinds of menus. Take a look at the forums, a significantly large number of them ask about how to remove the messaging menu (because they dont use it)
In addition, I have a clipboard manager in the system-tray. Which menu does that come under ?
> No competent designer, sitting down to design an operating system from scratch, would say to themselves “I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”.
heh, this quote reminds me of one of the most fustrating things about osx, theres like 4 ways to hide a windows
1. minimise to dock
2. "close" but dont quit
3. hide
4. quit
I think I might be missing one as well, and they all work completely differently when you want to being the windows back.
I'm forever getting mixed up between the status menu and the messaging menu. The only thing I really use them for is Empathy, which now seems to be split between two menus. And to bring up the contact list it now takes two clicks (or more often three because I clicked the wrong menu) instead of one.
I don't like to just minimize Empathy or Rhythmbox since that gets in the way of my "working set". As a programmer working on distributed systems I often have perhaps up to a dozen windows in a workspace in each of eight workspaces. "System" stuff gets in the way of my window management. I'd like this stuff to be somewhere distinctly different.
> No competent designer, sitting down to design an operating system from scratch, would say to themselves “I know, let’s have two completely inconsistent ways to hide windows”.
I disagree with this. I want two different ways, because they have two different purposes. One is my for the working set: stuff that I'm doing. The other is for stuff that's always there, like a new email notification, an IM contact list, background music and the clock. I don't see a problem here.
I think that a notification bubble worked just fine for notifications. You'd have the icon pointed out to you, and then it would be there in the background using minimal space until you attended to it. That's about as unobtrusive as it gets. Grabbing clicks has never been a problem for me, but not being able to see under it has. I'd prefer to be able to close the notification bubble rather than being forced to wait; being able to click through is pointless if I can't properly see through.
Instead I now have an annoying popup telling me that I should update appearing in a separate window that I have to close only for it to pop up again. I understand that this is intended to be improved, but at the moment it seems to keep demanding attention and interrupting me and then it forces me to wait while it loads.
I suppose that the problem is that as an experienced user I know what the notification icon for "updates available" meant and I want it to stay there as a reminder. However, I only want to be interrupted once. At the moment (on Karmic) I get interrupted repeatedly and the only way to stop this is to remove the notification entirely.
I agree that the UI should be consistent. I would prefer if any suitable application had the capability to either minimize to the system tray or to the task bar based on a user setting with a sensible default. The close button should always close it (or if not, the behaviour should still be consistent across all applications).
I understand that some of my complaints are intended to be addressed already, so I look forward to my experience getting a little better, at least. I thank Matthew for the blog post - at least I know that these things are being worked on.