Re: [Usability] [Ayatana] The Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars, and More

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt canonical com>]

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Ryan Peters wrote on 06/08/10 17:15:
>
> On 08/06/2010 06:17 AM, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
>...
>> What sense does it make to have a menu that's labelled "Calculator"
>> when doing a calculation, "Banshee" when you're playing music, and
>> "Empathy" when you're chatting with friends -- but "Firefox" when
>> you're writing e-mail, "Firefox" when you're buying books, "Firefox"
>> when you're reading the news, "Firefox" when you're playing Farmville,
>> "Firefox" when you're posting on a Web forum, and "Firefox" when
>> you're watching Hulu? Not much sense at all.
>
> It lets people see what application window they have open more clearly

Sorry, I guess I didn't make my point clearly enough. Let me try again.

In this scenario someone is using (for example) Calculator, Banshee,
Empathy, Gmail, Amazon, CNN, Farmville, the Gundam AnimeSuki Forum, and
Hulu respectively. That they are using Firefox for 70% of these things
does not mean it is useful or informative for "Firefox" to appear in the
corner of the screen while doing them -- just as, for example, "Gnome"
or "Xorg" or "Ubuntu" or "GNU" or "Linux" shouldn't. Taking up that much
screen space with any of those brands may well be good for their
vendors, but it is not relevant to user goals.

> than looking for clues such as a super-tiny icon

In Ubuntu 9.10 and later, the application icon does not appear in the
window title bar, partly for the same reason (it's not relevant to user
goals).

>                                                  or the window title,
> which sometimes does not say the name of the application (like this
> Thunderbird window, which says "Write: Re: [Usability] [Ayatana] The
> Future of Window Borders, Menu Bars,-" (it cuts off there) or if the
> screen is in direct sunlight. I know this is a Thunderbird window
> because I opened it with Thunderbird and I'm used to this behavior,
> but what about people with mental or visual disabilities/deficiencies,
> or people that aren't used to how E-mail clients work? They shouldn't
> be excluded; GNOME is just as much for me as it is somebody that wasn't
> made the same way as I was or somebody that isn't used to GNOME, and
> I'd hate to leave them out.

You're assuming the point. Why should I care that it's a "Thunderbird"
window? That matters only if I often use multiple e-mail clients and
need to distinguish between them. Otherwise, it's obvious from the
design of the window that it's a window for writing an e-mail message.
Unnecessary cognitive load is just as much a problem for people with
disabilities (even more, for those with mental disabilities), so using
them as a rhetorical bludgeon won't work here.

> Also, what sense would it make to have the menu do different things for
> every tab?

I wasn't suggesting that the menu should exist at all.

>            People know what a web browser is.

By far, most of them do not.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4MwTvtyrUQ>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEt0N3xu0Do>
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH5ZIXItkS8>

>                                               The menu doesn't control
> the page, but rather the application that renders a page. For
> OpenOffice.org, the menu wouldn't say "editing my resume" or "designing
> a website" or "putting numbers of some sort into a table", would it?
> No, because that's things that people use OOo for and they know that
> it's all the same program; same with Firefox.

If you have a document open in Microsoft Word and a spreadsheet open in
Microsoft Excel, and you choose "Quit" from Excel's application menu on
the Mac (or "Exit" from its Office button on Windows), the spreadsheet
will close. But if you had the same document open in OpenOffice.org
Writer, and the same spreadsheet open in OpenOffice.org Calc, and you
chose "Quit" from OpenOffice.org's app menu in Gnome Shell, the
spreadsheet would close, and -- surprise! -- the document would close too.

Why? Because Microsoft Word and Microsoft Excel happen to be coded as
separate applications, but OpenOffice.org Writer and OpenOffice.org
Calc happen to be coded as a single application. Given how far off you
were in thinking people knew what a Web browser was, please excuse me
for not taking your word for it when you claim that people "know that
[OpenOffice.org] is all the same program".

The app menu does not introduce this problem, but it does perpetuate it
and enshrine it. And "Quit" is given as the first example of an item
justifying the menu's existence at all.

>...
>> In our user testing of Rhythmbox (results to be published real soon
>> now), one consistent result was that no-one understood the distinction
>> between "Close" and "Quit". In other words, they didn't distinguish
>> between the window and the application.
>
> Then I'd assume that GNOME Shell would help them understand the
> distinction even better because it makes a larger difference now.

It is one direction in which to attempt a solution, but it's one that
increases cognitive load rather than reducing it. (A relevant example of
reducing cognitive load is provided by iOS, where there is no equivalent
to an application menu, and "Close", "Quit", "Minimize", and "Hide" are
merged into a single command.)

>...
>> And "Check For Updates" is, in Ubuntu and other Gnome-based OSes,
>> the job of the OS rather than the application.
>
> Not quite. GNOME has no "official" package manager. Fedora, Debian,
> Ubuntu, Arch and so on, do. GNOME by itself exists without a package
> manager, and there are quite a few people that don't use package
> managers. While it is less organized, and package managers are why so
> many people love using Linux, a Check for Updates option (which is
> built into every version of Firefox) would make sense if it isn't
> disabled (and most package maintainers ship Firefox with this option
> disabled because of package managers).

What? The point is that "Check for Updates" is being used, on the page
describing the application menu, as an example of something that would
appear in it. But for the vast majority of Gnome users it should not be
in *any* menu, so it is not a valid example.

>...
>> Or to put it another way: The Gnome Shell application menu mimicks the
>> Mac OS X application menu almost exactly. It may seem "shiny" or
>> "familiar" to those designers who use a Mac, but it is obsolete today
>> and ignores the historical context that led Apple to introduce it in
>> the first place.
>
> Have you even /looked/ at the page detailing the menu
> <http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu>,

Yes, that's why I'm writing.

>                                                                or even
> /tried/ the work-in-progress menu? It doesn't mimic the menu. In fact
> there are /several/ differences. Mainly, Mac's menu bar has every
> single menu bar option, while GNOME's only has those relevant to the
> application

That's not relevant. We were discussing the app menu, not the menu bar
as a whole.

>             to reduce confusion among new users and making the desktop
> seem more integrated and organized.

Those are new claims that you're making without evidence.

>                                     Therefore, it isn't "familiar" to
> Mac developers because it works in a totally different way (drop-down
> instead of immediately accessible, yet taking up less space).

They are both pull-down menus, taking up almost exactly the same amount
of space. The biggest difference is that the Gnome version uses the
application icon (in quite a stylish way), while the Mac version does not.

>                                                               It
> doesn't ignore any historical context; the page detailing the menu as
> well as the design document are very, very detailed and instead of
> directly moving forward, they're simply taking a step back, looking at
> what they have, and how they can improve it for everybody. That's not
> just people who are used to GNOME, or people used to other OSs, or
> people without visual or mental problems, or "power users", but
> everybody they can. You'd be amazed at the level of detail they're
> approaching this project with and the questions they ask while doing
> so.
>...

These are examples of what I meant by giving historical context for a
design:
<http://design.canonical.com/2010/04/notification-area/>
<http://design.canonical.com/2010/05/menu-bar/>

In contrast,
<http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Design/Whiteboards/AppMenu> (and the
equivalent section of
<http://people.gnome.org/~mccann/shell/design/GNOME_Shell-20091114.pdf>)
doesn't even mention the Mac application menu, let alone Nextstep or the
Microsoft Office button. Of course, the Gnome Shell designers are under
no obligation to explain the similarities and differences, but I think
if they did, it would substantially improve their designs.

- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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