GNOME: Possible Recovery Strategies

An anonymous reader tips an article from Datamation about several suggestions for the GNOME project to answer user complaints and boost developer morale. From the article: "... with very few changes, GNOME 3 could be much more acceptable to most users. A moveable panel, panel applets, desktop launchers, user control of virtual desktops, menu alternatives that would remove the need for the overview -- all of these could be added easily as options. Together, they would reduce at least ninety percent of the complaints against GNOME 3. ... If GNOME is having trouble as a desktop environment, one obvious solution is to find new niches. Lopez and Sanchez suggested following KDE's lead and producing a tablet, while Lionel Dricot recently suggested a suite of cloud-based services. ... The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what they want. Instead, the project has preferred to rely on usability theory, treating it as an exact science instead of a collection of competing ideas supported by usually inconclusive studies that could be mustered to support almost any design. In GNOME 3, testing with actual users did not occur until near the end of the development cycle, when the chances of any major changes were remote."

Comments

Not just Gnome

[Meshach]

The one strategy that GNOME has never tried is asking users what

Almost all software has that problem.

Re:Not just Gnome

[MikeBabcock]

No offense, but I hope I never have to use your software.

User interfaces are all about art. A right way doesn't necessarily exist. Is right clicking better than a button? Are four buttons too many, or is seven? How many view types should be on one screen?

These vary from system to system, function to function, and a piece of software may work perfectly but suck because the user can't use it efficiently or simply hates using the software.

Lots of picky examples exist from the mundane like when I mouse over the chat window in Facebook, I expect the chat window to scroll, not the main window, when I roll the mouse wheel -- to the customer I have who want Enter to go to the next field in a form not tab because that's how it would work on a spreadsheet or a calculator.

Form shouldn't override function -- but form is very important, and almost entirely art.

Re:Revert back to what worked

[couchslug]

"Don't screw up the perfectly fine UI because you have nothing else to do. (GNOME 3)"

Al UI should constantly change because change is progress.

That's why the letters of the alphabet are revised every few years.

Any recovery strategy starts with "We're sorry."

[erroneus]

The first thing that would get everyone's attention is an apology and/or acknowledgement that they did it wrong.

There was nothing wrong with wanting to create a tablet friendly UI... nothing at all. What was wrong was trying to foist it onto desktop users. Wanna make a tablet UI? Great! Do that in ADDITION to what you already had *AND* make them compatible with each other so that a user or a program can work easily in either.

The desktop isn't going away any time soon. The very notion that people are ready to move on into the tablet hype world is ridiculous.

It's understandable that no one would want to be left behind or to have a fear that you might be considered late to the party or irrelevant if you don't have one ready when the market wants it, but to push it onto the market before it wants it? What were they thinking?

And I'm sorry developers might have low morale, but that bad smell they've been wondering about isn't coming from the breath of the users complaining, it's because they had their heads up their asses... which might explain why they couldn't hear the users...

Re:Extensions

[MikeBabcock]

I don't want to think where I put my windows. I know my personal browser sessions are on 3, along with any game I might be playing, my E-mail and other contact managers are on 1, and my database interface and Eclipse are running on 2.

When I want to save a window for later, I toss it over to 4.

I shouldn't have to think about it. That's how proper organization works.

Imagine for a moment if your clothing drawers automatically created and deleted drawers so you had to figure out where you'd put something, and if you took the last sock out of the sock drawer, the shirt drawer wouldn't be where you expected it. We use metaphors on desktops to help users organize their data, including the folder system. Making those metaphors less realistic kills their ability to use them for organization.

Re:Staying with gnome2

[epyT-R]

You don't make a case for the gnome 3 changes here. You just make assumptions about the people who criticize it. Old stuff isn't necessarily worse than new stuff, and new stuff isn't necessarily worse than old stuff. They both must stand on their merits. This trend of minimalism in modern UIs and applications was fine until they started cutting needed features and/or flexibility for its sake. Gnome 3 is doing this along with windows 8, and osx. I'm sorry, but I don't need all these assumptions made about where I keep my windows on a workstation class machine. They are not tablets.

Change for the sake of change isn't innovation.