Usability: The application menu is hard to find in Natty

Bug #721850 reported by Michael Kanis
This bug report is a duplicate of:  Bug #732653: Menus are hidden by default. Edit Remove
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This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ayatana Design
New
Undecided
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Unity
New
Undecided
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unity (Ubuntu)
New
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Bug Description

I just tested Ubuntu 11.04 Alpha 2 a bit and I think for average users it may be very hard to find the menu of applications.

Because the menu is hidden and only appears when the user hovers over the panel with the mouse, he can only find the menu, if he already knows that it is located there, which is an obvious contradiction. However, a user has almost no reason to try and hover the panel in his search for the menu, because it is not visually connected to the application at all.

New users, who don't follow closely the development of Ubuntu, as well as users migrating from Windows will have a hard time finding the application menu. I would consider this a major usability regression.

I know, that one might argue, that this is only valid the first time the user uses Ubuntu, but please note that there are a lot of users, who use the computer very seldomly or use Windows most of the time. (Perhaps it is necessary to mention, that I myself am a Linux-only user for over 10 years now)

I don't really see a reason, why the menu shouldn't be visible all the time, regarding the vast amount of horizontal space in the panel, which is now just empty.

Please think of someone near you, who doesn't use computers a lot, your parents or grand parents perhaps, and ask yourself honestly if they would get along easily with the current design.

Robert Roth (evfool)
affects: ubuntu → unity (Ubuntu)
Revision history for this message
Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt) wrote :

This is not a duplicate of bug 682788: that is about adding an option for where menus appear, not about changing their default visibility.

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