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Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

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Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#251

Post by account42 »

prmoustache wrote: post #247
butz wrote: post #53

Oh GNOME, hiding "Power off" option under additional submenu, that user wouldn't accidentally click it, and then putting "Format" right next to "Safely remove drive" in Files.

Unfair. Format is followed by ... which implies it opens a dialog. That dialog starts a 2 steps process, the last one being a warning in red telling you it will destroy every data permanently. There is no way you can accidentally format a device. Also, people who want a quick way to poweroff can change the behavior of the power button to ... poweroff instead of suspend.

Users are generally used to closing dialogs without fully reading them, especially dialogs they did not expect because they wanted to eject the drive because they want to leave now and are already running late.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#252

Post by account42 »

eviks wrote: post #229
ivanjermakov wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite UX is when on Windows you mount a drive of unknown partition type (e.g. ext4) there is a popup suggesting to format it with "confirm" selected by default.

That's very dumb indeed, and no way to disable properly, I think (had to use a script that watches for the window with this same prompt texts and autoclose it to avoid catastrophic results)

Dumb or malicious?

Not the first time Microsoft happens to "accidentally" break foreign systems.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#253

Post by account42 »

n3storm wrote: post #138
stuaxo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a shame SUN isn't still around, they did actually usability studies on GNOME, it would be great if one of the distros would step up here.

Yes! I am a Sun fan. But GNOME team did say they have done tons of ux studies long after SUN. https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Studies

Have they done "studies" to justify the changes they want to make or have they done real studies to find out what changes they should/should not make?

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#254

Post by Refusing23 »

jiehong wrote: post #65

This reminds me of not being able to right click in Files in list view for creating a new document or pasting something, because it only accepts a right click in an empty area. Yet, in list view, as soon as you have a few files and the window is full, you’re given no empty area to click in. I saw some people have the same issue [0] in the past, and it’s not really been fixed either [1]. [0]: https://ubuntuforums.org/…

i have that problem in my browser (firefox)

too many tabs and i cant right click the top bar and reopen a closed tab, or whatever

the small empty spot between the tabs and the minimize/close buttons, provide a different right click menu

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#255

Post by mhitza »

wao0uuno wrote: post #239
mhitza wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Define looks good, and doesn't break constantly.

Looks good: Doesn’t look like it was designed in 2008. Doesn’t break constantly: Doesn’t break constantly.

> Looks good: Doesn’t look like it was designed in 2008

Lucky us then, most DEs work on UI paradigms way older than 2008.

> Doesn’t break constantly: Doesn’t break constantly.

GNOME is well know for breaking often backwards compatibility, especially in regards to extension.

The only criteria which I'd thick next to de GNOME DE in consistency, would be: aversion to customization, opinionated, 80% done in perpetuity, and liberal use of space (low information density)

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#256

Post by kuschku »

criticalfault wrote: post #209
kuschku wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One exception: in dolphin you cannot open files directly from smb:// shares ??? Of course you can. Your comments sound like you installed KDE ontop of a distro that uses gnome by default, missing half the packages. KIO exposes pretty much every possible protocol (including smb, dav, ftp/sftp/ssh, etc) to every KDE app, including Dolphin, Kate, Gwenview, Krita, Okular, etc. If you're trying to open SMB files in Gnom…

Nope, it was laptop (bare metal), kubuntu or fedora KDE Spin. Player might have been installed via flatpak though. But I don't remember anymore.

Sounds like your problem was that while KDE supports SMB, your player does not.

While Gnome will use fuse to mount SMB into the actual file system, KDE built supports for protocol like SMB natively into their libraries.

The KDE approach has the advantage that you get native permissions and don't have to mount them into the filesystem, while the gnome approach has better backwards compatibility for third party apps.

That said, KDEs players as well as VLC should have worked. I'm using KDE with SMB daily.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#257

Post by [deleted] »

627467 wrote: post #184
savolai wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Users have plenty of individual characteristics. If even ordinarily capable user’s can’t deduce what button does what, forget people with disbilities. It’s obvious you need to usability test this stuff. Gnome has neglected their basic duties. https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/ 2. Human-Computer Interaction is a scientific field within Computer Science, and this is stuff from any 101 course. Do…

...and here is my missing point 3. "Citing Norman heuristics like gospel"

[deleted]

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#258

Post by horsawlarway »

troupo wrote: post #249
horsawlarway wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, what user? Someone in his late sixties who grew up on Windows 3? Sure. Someone in their twenties/thirties...? Coming from Mobile? Young teen? I strongly suspect they all have different expectations then you. Two different hover tool tips and a distinct hover state difference on a control optimized for screen size is very much the standard there.

"Two things grouped together signify similar/same things" is age-independent "View options should include settings for list/details view, not sorting options" is age-independent "Control optimized for screen size".... on a desktop? It's not a mobile screen. The fact is that "designers" and "developers" like you don't understand the problem and have trained a new generation of people to not expect anything to work as…

Old man yells at sky energy from this comment.

What you are essentially saying is that you no longer feel like this is expected/natural/intuitive.

And that's a perfectly fine thing to say. I'm mid-30s and I still like sticking my credit card into the machine instead of tapping it. It feels comforting and normal. It's not the better experience, objectively, though.

The absolute same thing applies here. The button is clearly visually distinct halves. If you are not familiar with that paradigm, I understand that it feels unnatural. But given that the fucking tooltips on each half are literally "List view" and "View options" and the hover state is clearly identifying that the button is two parts... what exactly do you want here? The view options has the list setting RIGHT FUCKING THERE. Important enough it's literally at the top level to make it easier to switch, given that that's the thing you most often do with the button. It's objectively the better power user experience - changing views is only a single press, instead of multiple clicks.

You can certainly make some HID research complaints with modern designs, but this really isn't the one that's going to be a compelling example.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#259

Post by consteval »

jampekka wrote: post #125
userbinator wrote: post #121

I don't get the obsession with "clean" UIs, nor how hiding everything and replacing it with tons of whitespace and nondescript icons can be "calming". It's sterile and unwelcoming like an empty house or unused workshop.

Clean and well thought out UI is like clean and well thought out plumbing. Just works, doesn't need fiddling and stays out of the way.

Right, but UI is just the interface the user interfaces with to do stuff. Less buttons means you can do less stuff, necessarily.

Nautilus (or gnome-files, whatever it's called now) can't do a quarter of the stuff Dolphin can.

For some use cases and some users that's fine. For others... not so much. I mean, imagine if you took out 80% of the buttons in photoshop. Could a pro still edit a photo? Probably not. But the UI will be clean.

Re: Gnome Files: A detailed UI examination

#260

Post by consteval »

wao0uuno wrote: post #238
pona-a wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

KDE? Cinnamon? MATE? LXQt? When I was in the GNOME bubble, I too thought GNOME was the be-all and end-all of Linux DE usability, with everyone else being savages slapping together UIs without so much as a style guide. Perhaps at some point this may have been partially true. Today, all major DEs are fine. Plasma did not crash once since 2019 for me and I think its UX is quite nice, in the case of Dolphin in particular…

Only KDE and Gnome offer proper Wayland support making them in my eyes the only truly modern DEs on your list. Out of these two, Gnome is the only one that doesn’t glitch constantly. It’s true that Plasma finally stopped krashing every time you look at it funny but it’s still a bloated, glitchy mess of a DE. You really can’t count on KDE to provide updates without introducing major bugs and stability issues as proven…

I don't think this is true, I haven't gotten plasma crashes for a long time now. Even early into Plasma 5 it was stable.

Also bloat is so very debatable. You can't on one hand complain about Gnome being unusable and then turn around and say Plasma is bloated. Uh, that "bloat" is the difference between the two!

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