Re: Feature proposal: combined system status menu

[Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com>]

2013/4/22 Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>

Hi all,

This is something that me, Jon and Jakub have been thinking about for
some time, and is now at the stage where we can start to think about
implementation. I'm proposing it as a feature for 3.10 [1].

The main element of the design is to combine the sound, network,
bluetooth, power and user menus into a single menu. This will enable
us to resolve a number of UX issues we've encountered with the
existing design (badness on touch, difficulties having the user name
in the top bar, lots of complexity in some menus, like network,
virtually none in others, like sound...). It will also give us greater
flexibility, and will allow us to deal with some features - like
airplane mode - in a more elegant and discoverable manner.

More details are outlined on the wiki [2]. If you do look at the
designs, please pay particular attention to the example scenarios -
these give a clearer idea of what the menu will actually look like.
The designs aren't finalised yet, so comments and ideas are welcome.

It should be said that, as with any design, there are tradeoffs here.
There are lots of advantages to this approach (see the design page),
but there are one or two actions that might require an extra click
with the new design. The primary example of this is switching wifi
networks: with the new design, this will require that you open the
system menu, click on the wi-fi entry, and then choose the network you
want from the control center panel (as opposed to just selecting the
network from the menu itself).

However, while switching wi-fi networks will require an extra step, I
actually think that the the experience will be better with the new
design. The current network menu contains a lot of information that
isn't related to wi-fi, and isn't exactly straightforward to use - in
many respects, the new design will be more straightforward to use,
even if there is an extra click involved. Also, we are planning a new
wi-fi selection dialog, which should be a big improvement in those
situations where you are not already connected to a network.

Hi Allan, and thank you for letting us know of this plan.

As one of the implementors of the current status icons, and current developer of gnome-shell, I can tell it's a small can of worms, but that's not what this is about.

Rather, what I'd like to point out is that, in my opinion, this needs more thinking through before going straight to shipping.

I mean, I trust the design team and I value your experience in the field, but this is another radical change, and it's quite different from our competitors.

Unfortunately, we don't have the benefit of two years of betas, so if we implement and deliver this 3.10, there is a risk of an impendance mismatch between what's expected from the designs and theory behind them, and how the user effectively react. Which would bring even more negative publicity to GNOME.

This is generally a problem of every fast releasing project with little man power, so it affected many of the features in 3.8 and before, but at least at time we had the validation of other systems doing the same.

To me, a reasonable compromise (yet to decide if technically possible) would be to have a "feature branch", that is not merged in master until after it's thoroughly user tested. And that possibly gets punted to 3.12 or never, if it turns out to be a bad idea.

Giovanni