Hi, i think this is my first post in this list after years on it XD.. anyway... I had a chat (or more like.. an argument?) with my colleague in my company about what Fedora lack in term of user experience which made Ubuntu stand out more for normal users. He's an Ubuntu user, a developer who view stuff from a non-technical, end user perspective, who everytime he try to move to Fedora, Fedora's current state always turned him off. Of course, he knows that he can modify that himself, but thats not the point here, as we are talking about user experience for a non-technical person. So i thought of sharing the stuff he raised, hopefully someone who have the resources (time/skill) to improve this read this and improve it: 1) Polish While technically, Fedora desktop have almost the same apps Ubuntu desktop have, however, Fedora desktop apps fell behind in term of polish. 'Polish' here includes: * icon set Fedora icon set, which uses Tango, is not user-friendly. Take for example the notification area, in Fedora, our notification area is a mix of colorful icons from many applications, which - doesnt look good on the panel - but more importantly - makes the notification area confusing and less useful. - the approach in Ubuntu, and in Mac, is that application icons, especially those which have system tray icons, are standardized in a particular style guideline. When a notification area icon is idle, the icon uses a faded out scheme, but when theres a notification, they switches to a brighter colored scheme Similar rule apply to applications which involves notification such as messenger, email, etc. * application defaults In Fedora, probably because of our upstream mantra, our application usually uses whatever default configuration upstream provided. While this works for technical people who knows (or bother to) change their settings, a non-technical person would want a sane, usable defaults when they first launch the application, which will allow them to do the common tasks associated with the application without the need to figure out how to configure it. 2) application feedback Ok, i think this mainly apply to Fedora's packagekit, but probably other apps too. Our packagekit UI lack of feedback, such as no download progressbar, and the current task info is too vague. It happens a lot where packagekit simply showing "downloading repository information" .. but only remain like that until everything are downloaded... if you are in a slow network, the user experience become very bad as the lack of feedback made user anxious on whether something is working, or not working. Its agreeable that user are not supposed to care about the internal details, however, some sort of feedback gives the user assurance that the application is working or not.. Application feedback for events such as a usb device is connected or unmounted, new hardware detected also makes a difference in user experience.. ===== Thats it for now i guess.. i'll post more if i end up arguing stuff with the colleague about fedora again XD .. Hope this post will be useful for someone :-) -- Mohd Izhar Firdaus Bin Ismail / KageSenshi Inigo Consulting (FOSS/Plone Development, Training & Services) http://www.inigo-tech.com Fedora Malaysia Contributor & Ambassador http://blog.kagesenshi.org 92C2 B295 B40B B3DC 6866Â 5011 5BD2 584A 8A5D 7331 -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
