Feedback on the Action-Info Bar Proposal

[Nick Richards <nick endlessm com>]

Hi there,

I'm a Product Manager at Endless, we ship Nautilus and a GNOME based desktop to users all around the world and our users are squarely in the target market for this feature. I grabbed the testing Flatpak and ran some discussion internally with our design team. 

We’re excited to see effort being put in to improve the user experience for Nautilus, especially for users who are less familiar with computers or struggle to navigate some of the hidden UI. 

That being said, we’re not that thrilled with the current execution and, if it lands, would seek to disable it within Endless OS. Carlos, as you mention in your blog post the visuals are quite imposing. However we feel that the UI actually needs more hierarchy and differentiation. Several equally sized text only buttons next to each other smoosh together into a bit of a mush, which strikes against some of the discoverability improvements of promoting actions out of context menus.

Overall, the second design option mentioned in the thread comes a lot closer to our thoughts:

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/uploads/be5f3f57a7ec6e3bea52809c01c34ef2/image.png 

There’s an obvious positive action, less important actions are visually deprioritized and there’s more variety by allowing icons. However for us the position at the bottom of the screen feels terribly disconnected and we’d still love to try and find ways to bring these actions closer to the selection that they apply to. Whilst it’s a lot harder to design and implement a more connected experience would be much better for users of pointing devices.

I know that there's been some iteration of the designs on the gitlab issue that looks encouraging but I wanted to make sure that you got some 'official comment' in the forums you asked for it. Once again, much applause for attempting to improve the experience and being able to get involved at an early stage - it’s a great example of GNOME connecting with communities who we’ve found it hard to get feedback from and I’m sure that we’ll be able to make better software for everyone because of it.

Thanks,

Nick Richards

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Nick Richards  |  +447881621787 |  Endless