Opening programs or folders via dash is too confusing

[sid payton]

Opening apps you don't know the name yet is quite hard with the current dash in precise.

For excample my parents complayed about, how they could open an app or files and folders, when I visted them last time.
They didn't know what app does what.

I added a PDF with some ideas on how to change that. To make it easier for new users.

[Nekhelesh Ramananthan (nik90)]

Thank you for reporting this bug. This requires further design input from the ayatana team. Hence marking it incomplete as part of the standard protocol. It will be still looked into. Might I also suggest that you bring this up in the unity design mailing list since you can discuss this with other Unity developers and get their opinions on this. Launchpad is certainly not the right place to do this..and the mailing list would be suitable for this discussion.

[Rik Shaw (rik-shaw)]

This is a decent mockup. I would suggest that, even though it breaks consistency across apps, the category filter for the Applications lens needs to be on the left side, so as to more efficiently be navigated when starting from the dash icon in the launcher.

Of course the current model of getting to the Applications lens is also not ideal. Somehow may be good to have lens icons on the left? Then click dash icon in launcher, move slightly right, click Application lens icon, move slightly right to choose catgory (dynamic hover would be good here as an option), move slightly right to select application. In this way, the mouse travel is very efficient.

One additional suggestion is to have the "Application description" show once an Application is "hovered over".

These ideas are used by standard Application menu launchers such as Cardapio, AxeMenu, or MintMenu.