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

  • From: kallisti5@xxxxxxxxxxx
  • To: haiku-development@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2015 15:34:28 +0000

September 22 2015 12:19 AM, "Adrien Destugues" <pulkomandy@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

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.

True. It's funny how people keep looking to re-invent the wheel when it has
quite a bit of history in it's implementation :-)

"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?

Oh, I agree. Just reciting comments from ML emails around it.

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.

Yeah, quicklaunch performs the same task. I think we could do it better though
within the deskbar.

<super key> -> Type "Ter" -> screen shows applications matching "Ter" ->
terminal icon selected on screen -> Enter

https://help.gnome.org/users/gnome-help/stable/shell-apps-open.html.en

Every os has it built in. Windows, Mac, Linux (Gnome, kde)

Before anyone says "patches welcome", i'm mostly spinning the idea out there to
see if there any interested developers looking for a UX project :-)

-- Alex

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