The top right on/off button

[Phil Bull]

Hi guys,

On Mon, 2011-04-18 at 11:16 +0100, Tom Davies wrote:
> Hmmm, as you say most electrical appliances use that symbol on their
> on/off button so i think we should call it that.  The session manager
> stuff are just variants on the on/off idea.  People switch off one
> user and switch on the other.  Ok, that is a bit of a stretch but i
> think it's more intuitive just to give it a generic name that
> non-computer users will recognise.

Have you asked any "regular" users what it should be called? There are a
couple of ways of doing this:

(1) Get a laptop, find a "regular" user who's never seen the UI before
(regular Windows/Mac users will do fine) and point at the menu. Ask what
they'd call it. Do this for a few people (you should find a
representative sample after asking ~6 people).

(2) Choose a name for the menu, whatever you think is best ("Menu X").
Get a laptop, find a different regular user and ask the user to point at
Menu X, without giving them any prompting or further description of it.
See if they guess which menu it is first time. Repeat for ~6 people.

We did some of this when deciding on the name of the "top bar" at the
recent GNOME docs hackfest in Toronto. It was pretty enlightening -
users are great at grounding terminology discussions.

Thanks,

Phil