Re: Where is the data?

[Jeremy Bicha <jbicha ubuntu com>]

On 19 August 2011 19:00, Giovanni Campagna <scampa giovanni gmail com> wrote:
> As a specific example of unscientific user testing, I got a friend of
> mine to try GNOME 3 at the desktop summit, and when it was time to
> shutdown he just asked me, because he found no way and he thought it was
> a bug. I'm sorry but I didn't have any explanations, so I just said "the
> designers said so", and similarly I had none when some KDE hackers asked
> me on the same problem.
> I know that what I write, following the guidelines and the mockups, is
> right. But people providing feedback don't always agree with that, and
> if myself cannot understand the reason, how can I explain to them?
> I understand that some features in 3.0 were like "design experiments",
> because we have the whole 3.* cycle to improve. But if the results of
> those experiments (that is, people's feedback) is not analyzed
> thoroughly, how can we be sure that the design is right? Or on the other
> hand, how can I see that the feedback is listened to, if decisions are
> never reverted?

The Alt modifier to get to Shutdown options in the usermenu is clearly
wrong. As far as I can see, that Alt modifier is used only once in the
entirety of GNOME Core and is definitely not a common interaction
anywhere in the software world. Thus it is completely
non-discoverable. It is impossible for anyone to ever figure out that
functionality unless they were told it was there. Core functionality
like powering off a computer should not be an easter egg.

I know that this has been discussed at length on the bug report and
elsewhere but the designers have so far refused to revert this
bug/feature so that normal people can use the usermenu effectively. I
believe Debian has interest in shipping a non-hidden Power Off button
and I'd expect Ubuntu's GNOME Shell package would follow that example.

Jeremy