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Was that user testing on new users, or experienced ones? There's a big difference between how to make the onboarding as easy as possible for someone who's never

Was that user testing on new users, or experienced ones? There's a big difference between how to make the onboarding as easy as possible for someone who's never used your system before, vs making it efficient to use for power users. The former gets you Ribbon UI and similar - which is really really good at that - but it means that people like me get annoyed when something they have to do 50 times a day now takes 3 clicks instead of one. I can understand that I'm on the losing end of a tradeoff that's a global improvement, but I still get annoyed. When you're building bazaars and not cathedrals though, there's no good reason why everyone should be using the same UI. Maybe I'm part of a 5% or less of the population who wants the title bar of the active window and only that to be my accent color, but the solution here is to just let me configure that. And I don't mean in the sense of "I can spend a summer learning and editing the source code and build a custom distro that looks the way I want", I mean that I remember the old days where this was either a switch, or the default, or a couple of lines in a config file. I gave up on GNOME when everything became "sure, you can do a term project on configuring the CSS files" if you really don't like THE ONE true design choice.

Avamander 4y ago
Unity had a lot of features for power users as well (good default shortcuts for ex.) and the global menu was a godsend on smaller screens. So I wouldn't say it's really an either-or scenario, just that tastes differ.
simion314 4y ago
I think there wee people that used computers before, user testing will usually identify situation you describe where doing a task takes too many clicks. My issue is with big ego people, they use the excuse of casual user to impose their views, I have a KDE example too (so GNOME users can stop downvoting this without any comment explaining why) , on KDE4 the big ego dude added a thing in the corner, "the cashew". the users asked for an option to hide the ugly thing but the dude refused to add an option, he refused patches,. Now some people will say that we the users do not understand that adding options is adding complexity but this is not the case here and in the end KDE removed it https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbox-icon https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbo... probably after the big ego dude left. This is not the only KDE example, t was the same with scrolling on some widgets, options to disable it was refused by same dude. No user testing, no group of people thinking about it, just one big ego person thinking that because he read half of a book he is a big visionary.

Avamander 4y ago

Unity had a lot of features for power users as well (good default shortcuts for ex.) and the global menu was a godsend on smaller screens. So I wouldn't say it's really an either-or scenario, just that tastes differ.

simion314 4y ago

I think there wee people that used computers before, user testing will usually identify situation you describe where doing a task takes too many clicks. My issue is with big ego people, they use the excuse of casual user to impose their views, I have a KDE example too (so GNOME users can stop downvoting this without any comment explaining why) , on KDE4 the big ego dude added a thing in the corner, "the cashew". the users asked for an option to hide the ugly thing but the dude refused to add an option, he refused patches,. Now some people will say that we the users do not understand that adding options is adding complexity but this is not the case here and in the end KDE removed it https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbox-icon https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/10/kde-kills-desktop-toolbo... probably after the big ego dude left. This is not the only KDE example, t was the same with scrolling on some widgets, options to disable it was refused by same dude. No user testing, no group of people thinking about it, just one big ego person thinking that because he read half of a book he is a big visionary.