GNOME3 and au revoir WAS: systemd: please stop trying to take over the world :)

[Adam Williamson]

On Fri, 2011-06-17 at 12:02 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:

> > You can search for "bro" and among the results will be Nautilus and
> > Firefox (hint: Gnome Shell also searches in the application description,
> > and both are "bro"wsers).
> 
> I can't believe real usability testing was done on the final version
> of GNOME 3.  I keep hearing about all these completely undiscoverable
> keyboard shortcuts that appear to be necessary to use GNOME 3 with any
> sort of effectiveness.  When I struggled with GNOME 3 for about a week
> I didn't discover or use any keyboard shortcuts.

Consider it a two-level interface.

For complete beginners or those who will always use a very slow,
hunt-and-peck type approach to anything, GNOME 3 is entirely navigable
with a mouse and meant to be quite discoverable and 'reliable' when used
in this way. This is a priority over it being fast and efficient when
used this way, because if you want fast and efficient, you can use
shortcuts.

For more 'advanced' users, the keyboard shortcuts are there, and you're
probably going to want to use them if you don't want to gnaw your own
legs off out of boredom. No, they're not particularly discoverable: it's
very difficult to design an interface which makes keyboard shortcuts
discoverable without pissing you off once you know them. I mean, when
have keyboard shortcuts ever been discoverable? Is alt-tab discoverable?
Is alt-f4? No. We just pick them up somewhere and learn them.

Because GNOME 3 is a new design there are a few uses of the keyboard in
it that you probably wouldn't know about previously. So, as an advanced
you learn about them. It'll take you ten minutes and then you're done,
just as it took you ten minutes to learn the keyboard shortcuts you know
already, ten minutes to learn about piping and xargs and grep and find
and the awesomebar and and all those other little shortcuts you use all
the time in any application you're at all familiar with, in order to be
more efficient with it.

http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/CheatSheet
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net