Call for Natty Feedback! (application starter)

[Bjoern Michaelsen]

Hi Jason,

On Wed, 2 Mar 2011 06:28:24 +1030
Jason Warner <jason.warner at canonical.com>
wrote:

> In particular, I'm interested in seeing
> how people feel about:
> [...]
>
> * Usability

you cover quite a broad range with that email, to I will just pick out
one topic as long it is fresh: My experience as a new user of unity and
using the application starter as it is one of the most important part
of the desktop. Consider three usecases for this:

- Starting a often used application
- Starting a rarely used application
- Searching/Browsing for a application

and lets compare the unity application starter with a classical
hierarchical popup menu.

= Starting an often used application =

This can be done easily by users of all experience levels for the six
most used applications using the "Most Used" section. Good. However for
the next six the case is not that clear: While I can click on the "see
6 more items", I cannot see which those are and I usually dont count
which apps would fall in the 6-12 most used range and to spare myself
the disappointment of not finding them there, and type in the name or
browse in the "installed" section. Another point is that I would expect
the search bar to launch the application, if there is only one matching
and the user presses return (e.g. typing "gvi<RETURN>" should start
gvim), because you dont want to change back from mouse to keybord again
for that one click.

= Starting a rarely used application and browsing for an application =

Here is were I find most of the trouble: Let me showcase some of the
problems with a exaggerated example. The user want to change the look
of the sceensaver and is rather inexperienced. Here are the problems I
see for the user:
- When opening the menu, he will see "Appearance" as a choice in the
  installed section simply because it is early in the alphabet. He is
  very likely to click that suggestion, and be disappointed.
- The application group selector in the upper right corner is in a
  border together with the search bar. This suggests it does not change
  the behaviour of the item browser below. Also the default selection
  "All Applications" look a lot like a title and not like a active
  control to be used by the user (although there is a tiny arrow next
  to it, that again might again apply to the whole text search bar). A
  user might simply overlook it as a tool to limit his search in the
  item area. IMHO it should at least have its own separate border.
- Even if the user knows about this and wants to browse all system
  applications, he needs way to many clicks to get there:
  - Open application starter menu
  - click on "all applications"
  - click on "system"
  - click on "see XX more results"
  Every time he misses the settings dialog he is looking for, he has to
  repeat all steps.
- One cannot use the scrollwheel in the application starter, which is
  very unhelpful for browsing.
While this example might seem constructed, newcomers will try to change
some preferences right after starting to use Unity and this might
spoil their experience early on.

I think it would be very helpful to never show a subset of a icon group
based on alphabetical order, which can be misleading (see the
"appearance" example above). Alphabetical lists should either be showed
completely or not at all. The space on the initial opening of the
application starter should better be used for more of the "most used"
apps (showing 18 "most used" and having "installed" completely
collapsed). The group selector in the upper right corner should better
be a tab bar like this:

 http://i.d.com.com/i/dl/media/dlimage/66/79/3/66793_large.jpeg

using more space from the text search field (where it would not hurt to
be a bit smaller). That would also reduce the number of clicks in the
scenarios described above.

Best Regards,

Bjoern

-- 
https://launchpad.net/~bjoern-michaelsen