On Tue, 2012-11-27 at 11:29 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote: > On Nov 27, 2012, at 2:39 AM, Adam Williamson <awilliam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > 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 > > The instant you need text to explain how a GUI works, your GUI is a failure. Like I said, I am not a design expert and I'm not familiar enough with the state of such arguments to participate. I've noticed this is a definite trend in all modern software design, but I do not know if it's a universal constant which can be stated with such authority, especially as it relates to complex operations. My layman's understanding would be that you can make a relatively simple operation / set of operations more or less entirely intuitively discoverable, or you can make a complex set of operations intuitive _gradually_, by introducing a single element at a time (my silly example of this would be that Nintendo are great at doing it as a part of game design - you start off learning to jump and suddenly ten hours later you're riding a horse and simultaneously shooting things out of the air with a zoomable bow-and-arrow interface, or something). But I cannot right now think of an example of a GUI which makes a complex set of operations entirely intuitively discoverable when that operation is to be performed in a single go - which is what the custom partitioning screen does. Does software like, say, an office suite (used at an advanced level, not just a 'type this on the screen and print it' level), an advanced image editor, or an advanced video editor follow this dictum? If not, is that a function of bad design or an inevitability given the complexity of the tasks they handle? Still, I don't want to veer off into the theoreticals too much as it'd be getting off track and I'd be bringing the metaphorical knife to a gun fight. If your dictum is the one the newUI design is being done by, then great: we don't need more text, but we _do_ need to make the design more discoverable somehow, because it demonstrably isn't entirely so right now. -- 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
