On Fri, 2012-11-23 at 20:57 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote: > On Nov 23, 2012, at 7:26 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > On Wed, 2012-11-14 at 18:15 -0500, Chris Lumens wrote: > >>> So this is probably just the lack of sleep talking, but I notice a > >>> pattern in the comments about newUI is that people really aren't > >>> confident about which partitions exactly form part of the install, in > >>> newUI custom part > >> > >> Can you provide a little more detail here? Is there confusion over the > >> very concept, or over what's new and what's old, etc.? > > > > What I've seen on the forums is that people just don't quite get the > > concept of the custom part screen - that you have partitions down the > > left, including existing partitions and newly created ones, and that the > > workflow is to create a partition and then define its properties and > > assign it to a disk and so on. > > Oldui partitioning visually took up more than 1/2 of the screen, and this same information is compressed into 10% of my screen while not conveying the resulting partitioning. > > Oldui's modal dialog containing the details of each partition (file system, size, label) was 10% of the screen real estate, and is now greater than 50% and no longer modal. > > The result is a shift of available space, and hence emphasis, on details rather than big picture. And I think it's increasingly clear that most users need more big picture, than a huge amount of estate reserved for details. Also, newui is becoming increasingly wordy, with excessive amounts of text to explain things, which again emphasizes detail over big picture. Funnily I was kind of thinking the opposite - we don't have _enough_ text. I'm no design expert so I don't know if it's considered 'old fashioned' or 'undiscoverable' to have a simple line or two explaining how a screen actually works - maybe it turns out people don't read such stuff, I don't know - but to me, newUI seems to be missing some such things. The custom part screen has no explanation at all, it just sits there and you try to figure it out. Another little thing which confused at least one user: when creating a partition, what do you do in the size field? Technically it's awesome - it understands lots of different ways of describing a size. But it doesn't _tell_ you that, so you don't _know_ what to type, you're worried that whatever you type will be wrong or will break it. I know I found it a bit confusing at first. (Note I haven't really look at post-Beta stuff yet, so all of this post relates to what's in Beta; if any of this stuff has been improved post-Beta, I'm not aware of that yet). Here's an interesting forum thread: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=286162 ignoring the bit where I blow my top somewhat unfairly at Dan, note the utterly incorrect interpretation of the custom partitioning screen that the OP managed to come up with. It's apparent that at least one person can look at the custom part screen and imagine that it works a completely different way from how it _actually_ works, with the obvious attendant frustration. For those who don't have time to clicky, here's an excerpt: "I'm guessing here: This version of Anaconda seems to read the labels of existing partitions off the hard drive and, again I'm guessing here, maybe in conjunction with which existing Linux installations have GRUB installed, presents you with scenarios that it thinks would work, i.e. partitions with enough room to install Fedora. In the end, instead of choosing a disk partition by using standard "sdxy" nomenclature, you have to know the label of the partition you want to use (in my case, sda11 was labelled "test2") and tell Anaconda to use that as "/". Choose another partition label to use as "/home" if you wish. Then you get to tell Anaconda where to mount the other partitions, all by their labels." This is obviously not correct. :) One detail from that thread which is becoming a constant refrain on the forums is that people are confused when they go to create a partition and all they get is 'mount point' and 'size'. Apparently they don't grok the 'reverse workflow' and think 'obviously I'll get to decide what type of partition it should be and where it should go later', it seems a lot of people instead just think 'oh my god! I can't decide what type of partition it should be or where it should go!' I think the initial simple dialog implants that thought in their head, and then they just don't think to look around and find the + expander that exposes most of those options. Hope this doesn't come across as overly negative, and of course there is positive feedback on various elements of newUI too - I'm just isolating some of the negative feedback to identify areas we can improve on. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora http://www.happyassassin.net _______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
