Re: Launching an application requires too many mouse clicks in Gnome 3

["Jasper St. Pierre" <jstpierre mecheye net>]

You can pin apps to the dash by dragging them there, or right-click on
its icon in the dash.

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 1:43 AM, Xavier Cho <fender_rules yahoo co kr> wrote:
> I've been using Gnome 3 for some months, and overall I think it's definitely
> a step in the right direction. However, as a long time Gnome 1&2 user, I
> find it lacking in some aspects in terms of usability and features.
> Most of all, I think Gnome 3 requires too much user interaction when
> navigating in the program menu. In the days of global application menu, when
> you need to launch an application all you need to do was 1) click on the
> panel menu icon, 2) and navigate by hovering your mouse over the categories,
> 3) then click on the application. All it needed was 2 clicks and minimal
> mouse movement.
> However in Gnome 3, you need first 1) move your mouse to the upper left
> corner of the screen, 2) and click on the programs menu, 3) wait couple of
> seconds (especially when you click it for the first time), 4) move your
> mouse to the opposite end of the screen to click through the application
> categories, 5) and again move your mouse pointer to where the application
> is, 6) and finally click on the icon to launch it.
> In summary, now it requires 3 + number of categories clicks and much more
> mouse traversal to lauch an application, which I feel a setback in terms of
> user experience compared to Gnome 1&2.
> I believe the situation would be much better if we could make the categories
> traversable by mouse hover instead of clicks, and move the category menu to
> the left side to make it close to the hot spot on the upper left corner of
> the screen. And it'd reduce the unnecessary delay if it displays selected
> few favorite, or most often used applications instead of showing all of them
> when you click on the program menu. I guess even providing an alternative
> hot spot, say lower left corner of the screen to access the program menu
> directly would make it on par with Gnome 2 in terms of mouse clicks needed
> for an application launch.
> I suppose the direction Gnome 3 is moving toward is providing a simple,
> unified desktop environment for variety of devices, including tablets and
> even smart phones. However, I believe simplicity in software doesn't always
> lies in 'eliminating' features, but usually in intuitive design and 'hiding'
> advanced features.
> Suppose, there's some basic tasks which most of the users performs often -
> like launching an application from program menu - consists roughly 30% of
> all desktop features. And there's features which more advanced users need or
> which are not used frequently, like customizing desktop fonts, would
> consists another 30% of the features. And finally there's remaining 40% of
> the features which would rarely be accessed or by expert users or
> developers.
> Then you need to make those basic 30% of features readily accessible - no
> keyboard short cuts, no redundant mouse clicks) in a most intuitive and
> simple way. And you can still expose the advanced 30% of features accessible
> from GUI, but hidden from casual users, preferably by providing 'advanced'
> button like many applications do.
> For the remaining expert features, I guess executing terminal commands or
> changing gconf values to access them shouldn't be much problem.
> So, I'd like to suggest we should collect and priotize all the planned or
> implemented features in Gnome 3 according to a criteria similar to the above
> mentioned, then re-evaluate their accessibility and usability according to
> their nature. So if there's some basic tasks like accessing an application
> menu requiring too much mouse interaction, or some non expert features like
> chaging desktop fonts missing from the control panel, we could easily detect
> such problem and fix it in a consistent way if there's such a design
> principle understood and agreed upon among the most developers and users.
> I guess Gnome desktop has come a long way, and now it's not uncommon to see
> non tech-savy people use it as their primary work environment. So, it's all
> about user experience and usability which really matters and would put Gnome
> ahead of other competitors.
>
> Xavier Cho
>
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-- 
  Jasper