[haiku-development] Re: A random post on UI and UX design

  • From: Adrien Destugues <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 07:18:42 +0200

On Mon, Sep 21, 2015 at 08:13:23PM +0000, kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

There have been various posts about UI and UX design in Haiku over the years,
I wanted to briefly reflect on them.

"Haiku isn't touch friendly"

While using a touchscreen for every task sounded futuristic and exciting,
the fad quickly started to die off once users started doing real work and
realized that it just didn't mesh with any real-world workflow.

We knew this since people tried to use lightpens on 1980's computers.
Then they settled on the mouse instead for the same reasons. It's harder
to learn how to use a mouse, but in the end it's a lot better.

"Stack and tile is a hack"

Looking over the mailing list, there was some push-back to stack and tile
as a fad / hack that no-one would use.

It's one of the few features in our UI that was developed by a research
lab focused specifically on UI design. So, quite the opposite of a hack.
How many open source or even closed source projects have a research lab
helping them improve the user interface?

I do feel there are improvements that can be made. Metakey application search
/ execution is something I've found *extremely* handy in Gnome and Unity.
Once you work it into your daily workflow, clicking through menus feels slow
and tedious when you already know what you want to run. Metakey application
search within the Deskbar might be one of those nice Stack and tile like
changes that we could "sneak in". Like it? Use it. Don't? You don't even
have to know it exists.

Isn't that similar to Quicklaunch which is available in the depot?
Sorry, I'm not very familiar with Gnome/Unity.

--
Adrien.

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