Dash is visually hard to grasp and browse

[rima]

Binary package hint: unity

Click the application lense to open the application dash. It is kind of messy to visually grasp and browse, and finding something is challenging (it looks almost like a memory game). I know there is also the search bar to find things, but that's not the problem.

Our eyes cannot grasp too many icons on a row (that's why for example, newspapers and articles are often in skinny columns, so that are easier to read). At least on my laptop, I see six icons on each row which is a lot to handle if you're browsing for something: I believe that having 4, maybe bigger, icons would be much easier on the eyes. This obviously has its caveats: (a) we would have less suggestions upon opening the app dash when the 3 sections are still collapsed; and (b) we would need more columns in general.

For (a) we could have a longer (and skinnier) dash so that we would have 2 rows (4x4 icons) for the "Most frequently used" and "Installed" sections; for the "Available for download" section, one row should be enough. Notice that this has also the visual benefit that if we have the dash going down to the bottom, it would be in perfect harmony with the launcher.

For (b) we should still have this longer dash, and in addition something like pages rather than scrolling up & down (to have visual stability). Also, when expanding a section, say "Installed Apps", its icons could take the whole dash space (i.e. only one section can be expanded each time, and we could have some button to go back to the overview): now after expanding a section, rather than scrolling, we could have a couple arrows to move to the next and previous page. In this way, the rows are visually still but the content changes, which is much (much!) comfortable for the eyes (also given this stability, we would remember where things are more easily).

[Daniel Planas Armangue (daniplanas.a)]

It's sounds so interesting, you can make some mockups?

[Rik Shaw (rik-shaw)]

As an update to this original bug, we are now targeting Gnome-Shell with the "gno-menu" extension specifically because of the inability for "computer illiterate" users (3rd world users new to computers doing literacy work in their own languages) being able to browse applications in the dash. The dash is just so overwhelming and confusing, even after turning off all the external data sources, shopping suggestions, etc. An application menu that is browsable not just searchable is a core requirement in our location. Here is the link to gno-menu that we are using: https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/608/gnomenu/