Re: some more questions on the control center shell, etc

[Thomas Wood <thos gnome org>]

Calum Benson wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-01-24 at 17:43 +0000, Thomas Wood wrote:
> > Calum Benson wrote:
>
> > > Of course if we'd tackled that problem first, we might not have needed
> > > to switch back to a shell at all :/
> > Change back? I thought people had agreed that in the long run the menus 
> > were not a good idea, and that a usable shell was much nicer?
>
> There didn't appear to me to be any overwhelming consensus in the recent
> desktop-devel discussion, but admittedly I was probably reading it
> through menu-tinted spectacles :)

Ok, put another way, there weren't any massive objections :-)

> > The current shell is not perfect and it still has issues that need to be 
> > ironed out, but I don't think that any blocker issues cannot be resolved 
> > before release. Are we suggesting that even if we had a perfect shell, 
> > it would still not be more usable and accessible as using a menu?
[...]
> As I've said before, I always use the menus rather than the shell on
> both OS X and Windows when I'm using those, so yes, I'm biased in that
> sense.  All I can say is that I did audibly mutter an expletive when I
> had to open the control center shell on Ubuntu for the third time in two
> minutes the other night, rather than pick straight off the menu, and
> it's a very long time since a GNOME UI feature made me do that :)

If people really believe that the menu options are still the most 
user-friendly way of getting to the preference capplets, then we should 
enable that by default. I hope that the control center shell will be 
easily accessible to those people who prefer it (where as it was not in 
the past). I am reluctant to say "make it an option", because it is so 
obvious we are creating an option due to lack of effective decision 
making and design direction.

This really brings me on to another point Sri made when I was speaking 
to him on IRC. He used the term "interface churn" when I happened to ask 
his opinion on the new control center shell. He made the point that 
every time we change something in our UI, businesses and users will have 
to spend time and money retraining. Not to mention any books or guides 
that give examples about our desktop go instantly out of date. The 
change to the control center interface will mean that every single 
distribution that carries user documentation will have to be updated.

We seem to have a really difficult time deciding on changes to our user 
interface (gnome-main-menu discussion for example). How do we move 
forward with UI improvements when we face these problems? Do we need a 
group of trusted and motivated people to approve design changes?


-Thomas