Ubiquity Slideshow for Ubuntu

Andrew Sayers andrew-bugs.launchpad.net at pileofstuff.org
Sat Jun 13 15:08:30 UTC 2009


Hi Dylan,

I like the slideshow, but I think it needs to be shorter and more 
user-centric.  Here are some miscellaneous thoughts that occur to me:

A famous psychology paper[1] showed that people can remember about 7 
things at once.  Any more than seven slides of information, and people 
will start forgetting what you told them.

When trying to write concisely, I find it helpful to imagine each word 
costs £1 to write.  That lets me ask myself "would I pay a pound for 
this word?", and the answer is usually no :)

For the slideshow, I would suggest keeping each paragraph on one line.

The text sometimes focusses too much on "Ubuntu provides <feature>", 
instead of "Ubuntu lets you fulfil <desire>".  IMHO, users don't have 
much patience for that sort of lecturing.

The text would look better if it were vertically centred in the area it 
has available.

I've made a branch[2] that tries to fulfil the above as best as I can. 
It's a fairly ruthless cut, so you'll probably want to cherry-pick ideas 
rather than importing it wholesale.  The branch also makes navigation a 
bit easier - go to Slideshow.html#controls  :)

And a final thought - how would you feel about having an initial screen 
that says "thanks for installing, click <here> for the slideshow, or 
click <here> to play a game"?  You can have quite a bit of fun in 
Javascript nowadays, and I can't tell you how many times I've sat 
through yet another install screen, thinking "I could sure go for a bit 
of Pacman right now..." :)

	- Andrew

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magical_Number_Seven,_Plus_or_Minus_Two
[2]https://code.launchpad.net/~andrew-bugs-launchpad-net/ubiquity-slideshow-ubuntu/another-andrew-improvements




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