Re: Mockup/Design for Browsing of Applications

[Sriram Ramkrishna <sri ramkrishna me>]

On Mon, Jan 4, 2010 at 3:26 PM, Owen Taylor <otaylor redhat com> wrote:

On Wed, 2009-12-30 at 13:19 -0600, Apoorva Sharma wrote:
> After following the discussion in "All Gnome Shell Developers," I had
> an idea to solve some of the problems that were discussed - namely,
> the problems concerning the application menu.

Hey, thanks for working on this and coming up with the mockup!

> When looking at the current application menu, one can see that it is
> slow and just a hassle to use. Yet, for non-advanced users, this is
> the only easy method available for finding an application for a
> certain task.

The current application menu is pretty much just a place holder. We used
to have a category-based view, but since we didn't want to go that way
long term, and it was going to be a pain to port it to the CSS
infrastructure, Colin just dropped the categories and left a vertical
scrolling list.

Yeah I complained about the current application menu as being too slow and cumbersome when trying to find applications that aren't recently used.  For some reason the apps I use don't show up there and I get some list that I never use like Evolution.

I was going to write something about the port to CSS being difficult but I don't know enough of the underlying technology to say anything difficult.  But I guess I find it kind of worrisome if people want to write something against gnome-shell that might make it difficult to write neat utils.  Anyways, I might go back to this topic when I learn more about the internals.

You can see a rough plan for the future under "All Applications" in the
mockup. The basic idea is a grid that expands to take up as much of the
screen as necessary.

I think it will depend on the size of the icons/letters.  When I use Boxee it has a similar presentation of apps and I generally don't have a problem unless the position changes.  If the positions remain static then that's great.  Maybe make it user arrangeable if that is possible.

 

Questions I might have about that design are:

 - Is it going to work OK on a typical Linux system where the user
  may have lots of apps installed that they have no idea what they
  do? Do we need some way of segregating off "developer tools"
  or other categories that might clutter the screen with end-user
  irrelevant applications.

Ugh, kind of tough without lots of user testing.

 

 - Is it obvious to use the main search to refine the set of
  applications if you can't find what you are looking for? Do we
  need a duplicate search entry embedded in the grid?

Ugh more user testing. :-)  My gut reaction is that there should be only one search.  I would prefer it to be like spotlight on OSX or dashboard from long ago?

 - Is there some sort of hover that shows more about the application?
  The text says

Is that something we can control?  I would think that is a style guide issue.  We expect all good apps to have this.  If they don't then it is the app at fault.

 

  But what if that fails? Does the user have to launch the app?

Good as any other action I would think.

 

In general, we're not to thrilled by categories. If the user can't
successfully guess the category, then the process of searching through
all the categories for the right app will be slow and tedious.

I've ran into this before and I usually fault app developers for putting it in a strange place.  For instance, playonlinux installs in the game section even though it doesn't strictly do games.  I keep thinking it would be other some other application area.  Some of that is user expectation which could lead them astray.  For me I find it easier to use as it narrows my search but I do fall victim to category expectation.  I have no idea how to resolve that other than more accurate area on where to put it or make categories broader.  The broader the better.  I still consider it better than all in one place which puts a whole lot of information all at once.

And it's often not possible to guess categories.

In the current GNOME menu, categories also serve the function of
"remembered paths" - they facilitate muscle memory for where a
frequently launched application is. But we don't want the "all
applications" view to be a primary way of launching applications. If you
launch an application frequently, we want it to be in your favorites
well.

I'm willing to test that.  Currently it doesn't seem to behave that way with gnome-shell as of two days ago.

sri