'get software' behaviour inconsistent

[Kiwinote]

Binary package hint: software-center

s-c 1.1.25

Browse to 'get software' > 'accessories'. Now assume you want to get back to the main screen. There are two 'buttons' with the text 'get software', one in the sidebar and one in the pathbar. The button in the sidebar does not bring you back to the main screen, the button in the pathbar does. This behaviour should be consistent.

There are two design solutions to this:
 - make 'get software' in the sidebar bring you to the main screen when you are in the 'get software' section but not in a channel subsection.
 - replace the first item of the pathbar with a 'home' icon in all views (including channel views and installed software view, excluding in progress view). This would avoid having one piece of text duplicated in two screen locations and would give users a clearer understanding of the behaviour of the sidebar and pathbar.

The second solution seems a better solution.

[Matthew McGowan (mmcg069)]

Hi,

With regards to your second solution, could you provide some scketches of what you mean? I am not sure i follow...

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

I think Kiwinote means, instead of looking like "[ Get Software 〉 Accessories 〉 7zip ]", it would look something like "[ ☗ 〉 Accessories 〉 7zip ]", where ☗ is a home icon.

The difficulty I have with this approach (as I think I've explained in a bug report which this is a duplicate of) is, how would you make it consistent (or at least visually explain the inconsistency) with the pathbuttons used for individual sources and for Installed Software? For example, what would the pathbutton look like for "Canonical Partners" > "Adobe Reader 9"? Would you use a home button there too?

[Tim McNamara (tim-clicks)]

Interestingly, it's possible to get to the 'home' screen via the left tree view if you're deeper into the tree. E.g. Click "Provided by Ubuntu", then click on "Get Software".

@Matthew PT
+1

[Kiwinote (kiwinote)]

Hi everyone. Must have missed this one yesterday. I was indeed meaning "[ ☗ 〉 Accessories 〉 7zip ]" like mpt describes above, with ☗ being a grayscale home icon. I would also do the same for the partners view "[ ☗ 〉 Adobe Reader 9 ]" and the installed software view "[ ☗ 〉 GDebi Package Installer]". This would solve the problem of having two 'buttons' on the screen simultaneously with the same text but different behaviour (see original description). On second thoughts, it may be that this specific solution introduces a new issue, namely that users expect the ☗ icon, in for instance the installed software screen, to bring them to the home screen of the get software section. Then perhaps instead of the generic ☗ icon we would need to use the icons as used by the individual items in the sidebar. The question then is whether these icons would imply 'home of this section' to the users. They probably would when the pathbar is extended, ie "[ ⴲ 〉 GDebi Package Installer]", but perhaps not in the non-extended state, ie "[ ⴲ ]" (where ⴲ is the icon of the section as used in the side bar). This would also imply using coloured icons on the pathbar, which may or may not be desirable.

Just found the other bug mpt was talking about: bug #433838.