Indicator menus difficult to navigate on desktop [design]

[Pete Woods]

I've tried to include some screenshots here, to illustrate my point.

Pointer displacement:
First I click on the network indicator in #1, then I end up in #2. In this case, while I have clicked on the network indicator, what is now under my pointer is the battery indicator.

Horizontal scrolling:
As you can see in #3, to see all the indicators I must scroll horizontally by revving the trackpad left to right. This is a rather uncomfortable and unfamiliar gesture.

Hidden indicators:
Finding, e.g. the bluetooth indicator, is rather fiddly when hidden behind the horizontal scrolling region.

Menu size:
As you can see in #4, the indicator menu entries take up large amounts of screen space due to having large fonts, and lots of padding. The black menu background also extends right to the bottom of the screen, which is likely to look a bit ridiculous on e.g. a 27" 4K monitor. Opinion: I would definitely be in favor of the indicator menus only taking as much vertical screen space as they require - like traditional drop-down menus. Or, indeed, Gnome 3's indicators.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

I actually believe we have most of what we need in here:

https://sites.google.com/a/canonical.com/apps-and-platform-team/8-shell/indicator-reveal

The only (I think) unanswered question is what to do with hidden indicators.
Should they be always visible when there's space available?
What if there is not enough space?
Auto-scroll similarly to the launcher?
Maybe they show up on mouse hover?

[Pete Woods (pete-woods)]

I like those designs :)

May we could have clickable arrows to scroll the region left and right in the case the screen resolution was too low to show them all?

[Michał Sawicz (saviq)]

I don't think Unity designs like clickable arrows, see launcher, at least :)

[Pete Woods (pete-woods)]

Fair enough. /me has a look what OSX does, given our indicators are very similar to those.

[Pete Woods (pete-woods)]

Ha. It just hides the left-most stuff. Clearly Apple think this scenario is so unlikely they don't try and handle it too cleverly.

To be fair I did have to set the resolution to 720p (the lowest it will go) and spend 10 minutes finding new indicators to add, and showing "full date, including seconds" in the time indicator.