[Usability] Subdued Unlock button is confusing users

[Dylan McCall <dylanmccall gmail com>]

Hi everybody!

Many people are being confused by configuration tools using PolicyKit, not quite understanding that they must click the Unlock button. The issue here is that the button is hard to find at first glance, and usually not placed in a prominent manner.

Here is a short list of things that I think contribute to this issue, as well as some possible fixes. It would be good to have them in for 2.22, since at the moment the PolicyKit integration is causing a lot of confusion for the end users.

* People see that "everything is disabled", but there is no explanation for why that is. The only thing that serves as an explanation is the Unlock button, which really does nothing to explain matters; it is just the solution, but that doesn't help if somebody does not know what is wrong. (Furthermore, since the Unlock button currently looks disabled anyway, some may not even notice that it's usable, thus ignore it entirely). One fix would be an Unlock widget which more closely demonstrates that the dialog is presently locked. Another detail could be a label near the top of a window saying "These settings are locked, blah blah blah".

 * The icon for the button looks "greyed out". Grey icons for buttons here do not work, since disabled widgets with most GTK themes end up adopting that exact same shade. To remedy the greyed out button issue, a more colourful icon could do the trick, obviously. I have suggested that on the Ubuntu art team's mailing list, but it would fix everything if implemented in GNOME's defaults as well. (Looks to me that Ubuntu's theme is just inheriting GNOME's at the moment).

 * The Unlock button is placed in a spot that the user may look at after he has given up and wants to close the dialog. It is usually right beside the Close button, which is typically the position of a Revert button. I think it would make sense to put Unlock on the left side instead of the right, where one often finds Help or About. Because of those two buttons often being there, the left side can be anticipated as where someone looks when he needs to do something, err, before that thing has actually been done.

* Another possibility would be a different widget entirely for the Unlock button. I'm thinking a big and powerful looking switch. One that comes to mind as a good example is Apple's on / off switch for Time Machine <http://images.apple.com/macosx/features/images/timemachine_gallery04_20071016.jpg>. A similar widget could do the trick to grab a bit of attention simply from looking "different"  -- it may even look different enough to justify going elsewhere in the window...

* Some have suggested a more prominent styling for the Unlock button in the form of a coloured background. I disagree with this notion, but one other thing strikes me as possible: Selecting the button by default! The beautiful new Clearlooks theme hands a lot of extra styling to the selected widget, which is a realm I don't think has been explored much in UI design (simply because every other theme out there seems stuck with the ugly dotted lines idea so programs would rather have nothing selected by default). Selecting the Unlock widget by default could be a great contribution here in making it more visible, with Clearlooks giving it a very visible extra glow. Of course, some lunatic distros are not using the Clearlooks engine, so that wouldn't be the be-all end-all for discoverability, but I think it could help.

Bye,
-Dylan McCall

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