[design] Sort Items in Launcher By Frequency Used

[nicholas5]

This is something that you will hopefully think is a good idea , or at least spurn a discussion for further improvements.

When you have limited screen real estate eg: most budget laptops are 1366 x 768 and have quite a few items
on the launcher bar , it can be a bit unweildy to find the app you are looking for.

My Idea is thus :-

Add a feature to the Unity bar whereby apps are ordered by frequency used - most frequently used apps appear at the
top of the list and least used towards the bottom.

the Ubuntu button should always remain at the top , independant of the sort.

If this were to be implemented then the user should be able to enable / disable it from the control panel
if they wise to have the current operation.

I think this would be a great useability improvement.

Thanks

Nick

[Vesa Rautiainen (vesar)]

Quite nice idea but I see few problems in it.
The person who reported the bug says that in current implementation it's a hard to find the item you're looking for. But in current implementation user has a freedom to organize the launcher items in any order he wants. And by moving for example all mostly used apps next to ubuntu button at the top user would always know where to find them.

If we were to add the functionality that items are ordered based on the frequency in that case the order changes and user might have hard time to predict where to find the most used items.

Another possible use case can be that user has one particular app he wants to have an easy and fast access to. For the sake of an example let say "Call an ambulance app". User uses it very rarely but when he does he wants to access it fast and wants to be sure where to find it. So he adds at the top of the launcher to be the first item in the list. Now if the proposed frequency rule is followed it would gradually move more and more bottom and user would have no idea where it is at any given time.

Of course it would be possible to make this behaviour optional but we try not to bloat the system settings with optional component behaviours but rather have single holistic design to cover all main use cases.

But there is definitely something in this idea and we'll keep it in mind when improving the launcher experience.