On Tue, 2013-10-22 at 21:59 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Some user feedback and usability testing we've done indicates that
> having custom partitioning accessible only by a pop up dialog attached
> to the 'done' in the storage spoke is confusing - people search for
> custom partitioning on the first storage spoke screen, don't see it,
> give up and hit done, then they see it.
>
> I think we should consider providing a better pathway to it on the main
> screen rather than hiding it on the dialog. I think I was overzealous in
> trying to shield less-technical ("non-Pokemon") users from it in the
> original mockups and unnecessarily hurt the users wanting to access
> custom part.
Awesome. I think I'd phrase it more generally, though: the Installation
Options dialog (or rather, the three different dialogs with that title
that show up in different situations) has turned out to be the most
problematic part of the newUI workflow. (No attack intended, I
understand entirely the process by which we arrived at it; it's just
that in practice, it seems to be the thing that trips everybody up.)
> We had a discussion about this in IRC today, and after a few iterations
> (we started with
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/custom-part-button.png
> and iterated from there) I put some more work into a set of mockups that
> might work. The thing is, it's hard to just add a button here or move
> something there without affecting a lot of other things - in this case,
> the display of the dialog on exit from storage entirely and the
> encryption and autopart type options.
On the approach, A+: I like it. Killing Installation Options is
definitely the way to go. It makes the process more consistent and
understandable.
> Okay so here's a little walkthrough:
>
> AUTO-PART USER
> ==============
>
> 1) You click on the storage spoke icon and you see this:
>
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/inst-dest-horiz.png
So, um, terribly humdrum question, but: will it fit if Specialized &
Network Disks is populated? Looks like there's enough greyspace that it
could fit in, but just wanted to be sure.
> You might opt-into disk encryption, and you leave everything else alone.
>
> 2) You click 'Done' in the upper left corner. You go straight to the
> hub. Yeh. So basically:
>
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/dialog1.png
>
> Anything you would have been able to do in the dialog you already did in
> the main window. Except for choosing auto-part type. If you're not going
> into custom part, is the default auto-part type good enough? If not, the
> main screen design will need more thinking.
I hate to be Neddy Negative, but I fear it may not be good enough, no.
We have the new LVM Thin Provisioning thing available in F20 which
presumably was put in this way because we want people to be able to use
it without creating a whole custom layout. We have this idea that we
want people to be able to test btrfs so we can maybe make it the default
in future. And we definitely have an annoying bunch of LVM refuseniks
who will always pick ext4 because they 'understand how to deal with it'
and don't want to learn LVM. I'm afraid I'm not convinced we can get
away with 'defaults only' :/ But, see later!
>
> CUSTOM PART USER
> ================
>
> 1) You click on the storage spoke icon and you see this:
>
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/inst-dest-horiz.png
>
> 2) You click on the radio button that says "I will configure
> partitioning" and hit Done. Then you'll see this:
>
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/cp-ap-with-dropdown.png
>
> You pick the auto part type you want in the dropdown and hit create to
> let it do its thing and then tweak accordingly. Or you can start from
> scratch if you're into that.
>
> 3) You click on the 'done' button in the upper left corner of custom
> part and it does the same as it does now (summary of changes, then back
> to the hub)
A+, looks fine. Um. Except, are we ever gonna get around to
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=883148 ? I still think that
would be a worthwhile clarification.
>
> RECLAIM DISK SPACE POP-UP
> =========================
>
> Just a small mod to this one, since encrypt and autopart type are
> available else where, drop them:
>
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/dialog2.png
Could we consider a similar 'straight-to' approach here? You're only
going to see this if you pick disks without sufficient space and then
pick "Automatically configure partitioning", yes? You're not going to
see it if you pick "I will configure partitioning." - that's just going
to take you straight to custom part.
So since the user has already expressed a desire for "automatic
partitioning", can't we take them straight to the Reclaim Space dialog,
with an option added to go back to the Disk Selection screen if they
decide they want to go to custom partitioning or add more disks? I think
that would be cleaner and easier to understand.
>
> NO DISK SPACE POP-UP
> ====================
>
> No changes to this guy:
>
> http://linuxgrrl.com/fedora-ux/Projects/Anaconda/Sketches/Straight-To-CustomPart/dialog3.png
> Does this make sense? I know Chris had concerns about having two columns
> of options on the screen because translations can get lengthy, so I cut
> the text length substantially and did a vertical stack of options, but I
> made the radio buttons horizontally aligned (which the HIG actually
> allows for, who knew.) I also scaled the disk icon down to 96x96,
> although 64x64 might work better (need to account for icon height of
> network disks too.)
Oh hey you thought of my first point. Whoops!
> The only sticking point here is that auto-part folks won't get to choose
> their flavor unless they go into custom. But maybe it's good, people who
> don't really know the difference won't have to even make the choice. And
> it's easy enough to go into custom, hit auto part for the flavor you
> want, and get out?
>
> Thoughts?
So I have one minor and one major thing to add.
Minor thing: I _think_ the design misses one workflow we put back into
F19 by popular demand from F18: letting you go through the 'reclaim
space' dialog even if you have sufficient space available. Sometimes
people want that.
Major thing: I think overall this is a big improvement, but I think
we're still neglecting one fairly interesting category of use cases
which we also neglected in the original design: people who come in with
an existing layout and a very specific idea of what to do with it.
I think we were mainly thinking about the 'clean slate' cases in the
original design, I know I was. Of the hundreds of user reports I've
read / heard since then, the ones that seem least well-served by the new
design fall into a sort of middle ground between 'nice clean easy
auto-partitioning' (which really, honestly, works best if you have an
entire empty disk or a similarly nice and clean-cut 'clean slate'
situation) and 'custom partitioning'.
Custom part is pretty big and scary: it's an entire GUI partitioning
tool which is probably more capable than any single other standalone
tool I know about, actually. It's pretty confusing when you first
encounter it. I don't think we can 'solve' that: as long as we want the
installer to contain an extremely capable graphical partitioning tool,
it's going to have an inherent level of complexity. I don't think we can
design a single-screen partitioning tool that handles arbitrary
operations on existing and notional storage volumes, multiple filesystem
types, btrfs, LVM, thinp, mdraid and all the rest of it and yet somehow
make it simple enough for people who 'just want to do one simple thing'
to be able to magically figure out how without reading the docs and
without getting frustrated.
So far we've been telling those people, look, it's a big scary tool,
we're doing our best, we have all this documentation, just chill out,
read the docs, understand why it has to be so complicated, and you'll
get used to it. I mean, that makes sense to us: we know intimately about
all the horrible design challenges we're trying to solve in it. But to
_them_, it's kind of a sucky non-answer: "okay", they think, "I accept
that you guys need to write this mega-capable complex partitioning tool,
but look, all I want to do is say use Partition 1 as / and Partition 2
as /home and I STILL can't work out how to do it in this damn thing!"
Sorry for the narrative approach, but I hope it illustrated things a
bit :) So the use cases I'm thinking of are this kind of thing:
1) I just want to do a 'ghetto upgrade': re-use the partitions from an
existing install, preserving /home and blowing away the others
2) I'm a super-organized person who already has a workflow for dealing
with partitions, I've already created partitions for Fedora with the
tool I've been using for a decade and know inside-out, I just want to
tell you which partitions to install onto, no I don't want to learn your
completely new UI for a super-complex partitioning tool!
3) I'm an OS Pokemon Trainer. I've got three versions of Windows
installed, two versions of Ubuntu, one each of Gentoo and SUSE. I want
to blow away Ubuntu 12.04 and SUSE, leave Windows and Gentoo alone, and
shrink Ubuntu 12.10. (Or something along those lines...you get the
idea).
It's kind of a middle ground between 'full automatic' and 'full-fat
custom partitioning', and I think it'd be awesome if we could
accommodate that somehow. Have you seen Ubiquity? Its partitioning is
kind of incredibly dumb compared to ours: it gives you a little GTK+
table of existing partitions and lets you assign them mount points, and
if you want to do...anything else, it has a little button that launches
gparted. And, well, that's it. In all sorts of ways, it's way inferior
to us. But it actually serves the above use cases pretty well, because a
dumb little list of existing partitions with a very restricted list of
possible operations on them is kind of what people want in those use
cases.
I'm not 100% sure how we could incorporate a 'restricted manual' mode
like this into your design, but I think it'd be awesome if we could. I
think one general approach we could look at is using the custom
partitioning code for identifying other existing OS installations
outside of custom part. It's kind of funny, for instance, that the
'reclaim space' dialog doesn't really take advantage of this knowledge:
if you look at 'reclaim space', its tree view is very similar to the one
that oldUI custom partitioning had, the same kind of thing ubiquity has,
the thing that we made a point of throwing out of custom partitioning
because we thought it was difficult for some users. Yet we have it, in
the workflow that's supposed to be for less sophisticated users than
custom partitioning!
So I suppose the overall approach I'm feeling towards here is that we
could sort of soup-up the Reclaim Space dialog a bit in terms of
functionality, so it becomes sort of 'custom partitioning lite' - it
lets you perform a range of operations on a pre-existing layout, not
just deleting and shrinking to create space for a new auto-part layout,
but letting you specify Fedora mount points for existing volumes and
choosing to format or not. We could try and make it a bit nicer to look
at and easier to understand, using the knowledge we have about which
partitions are part of which OS installs. And we could slightly revise
how it fits into the workflow so that we don't need Installation Options
screens any more.
Perhaps if you have a non-empty disk and you pick Automatic
Partitioning, you always go to this new 'Light Partitioning' screen, but
it has a very simple and obvious 'don't touch any existing disk
contents, just auto-partition into free space' option, to keep the
simple flow available, but make sure anyone who wants to make simple
modifications is able to? And it has options to cancel back to disk
selection, or move over to 'full-fat' custom partitioning?
Or, hell, we could just do disk selection and then send EVERYONE to the
'light partitioning' screen, with a simple bypass option for 'just
auto-part into free space', a breakout to full-fat custom partitioning,
and the relatively simple UI for simple operations on existing
partitions for our 'middle way' use cases? I suppose then I'm kinda
re-inventing Installation Options, only it's a single dialog (not four
variants) with clearer workflows and the 'reclaim space' dialog folded
in and enhanced.
Anyway...the more I write about this, the more I think it feels like a
productive avenue to explore. Should I do some mockups?
--
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
http://www.happyassassin.net
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