Notifications: uselessness of

Matthew Paul Thomas mpt at canonical.com
Fri Feb 27 21:06:30 GMT 2009


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Jordan Mantha wrote on 27/02/09 17:23:
> 
> On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 8:56 AM, Mat Tomaszewski
>...
>> Yes, true. But that's only provided that you understood that you have
>> to click on the icon in the first place. We believe that many people
>> won't get to that conclusion with the U-M icon. That's why we decided
>> to make life easier for them.
> 
> "We believe" isn't very convincing. Why do you think people don't
> understand icons? What have you done to determine this?

It's an unfortunate attribute of human interface design that testing it
is extremely time-intensive, in comparison with testing other attributes
like speed and reliability. We are beginning collaboration with academic
institutions to do user testing of major parts of Ubuntu. But we will
never be able to test everything, so much of the time we will have to
rely on common sense. And common sense says that if update-notifier,
Gnome Do, and the Brightness applet have very similar highly symbolic
icons, for wildly different functions, at least two of those icons can't
possibly be obvious.

>                                                         I've not heard
> of anybody complaining about not being able to find the updates, quite
> the contrary.

Here's a fun example of someone not being able to find the updates.
<http://launchpad.net/bugs/175166>

>               Usually the complaints I hear are "why are there so many
> updates?!"

Yes, that is also an issue -- it is often mentioned in Ubuntu reviews
(along with befuddlement at the names and descriptions of the updates).
The changes to Update Manager in Jaunty fix this a bit for the first
update after a clean installation, by explaining that "These software
updates have been issued since Ubuntu x.y was released". I hope we'll
take a bigger swing at that problem later.

>            It's not that you're wrong, it's just that I don't have any
> evidence that what you're saying is true so I wonder what evidence you
> have that I don't. Has there been thought about how the icon or
> current notification system could be made better? How about user
> education? It just feels from this end that the Dx team had to do
> something "big" out of the gate to prove themselves so they just
> picked something to "revolutionize" in 6 months.

The reverse is true. As I said yesterday, we're starting small.

>...
> Who is it scary to? Who thinks an icon is scary but a flashing window
> list item isn't? Who thinks an icon is scary but windows mysteriously
> popping up isnt? We all want to make people's lives easier I think
> (there may be a few exceptions ;-)  ). I'm starting to get a little
> irritated by people in the Dx Team essentially saying that they know
> what users want/need/feel and the rest of don't and are just going on
> our own personal preferences and experiences. I don't think that's
> really what you're trying to say but it's really coming off that way I
> think to a lot of developers.
>...

Please do not blame the Desktop Experience team for everything -- they
are just implementing what the Design team asks them to. :-)

Cheers
- --
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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