[system settings] "Other vibrations" setting is misclassified. Found it under "Sound".

[Daniel van Vugt]

"Other vibrations" setting is misclassified. Found it under "Sound" but I would expect to find it under some other heading. I wasn't trying to change any sound settings. Just wanted the vibrate-on-touch to stop.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, what category would be better in your opinion?

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

It appears we don't yet have a better settings category to put it in. Maybe something like "User Interface" or "Accessibility" would be appropriate.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Thanks for this report. It’s true that putting vibration settings in a category called “Sound” seems awkward. However, that doesn’t mean there’s a better place to put them. There are good reasons to put them with sound settings, and bad reasons to put them in other places suggested.

Fairly often, when you change whether/which sound happens for something, you will want to change whether/which vibration happens for the same thing. (Especially since on many devices, vibration is actually noisy.) So having those settings next to each other is convenient.

Meanwhile, it’s unlikely that there will be a “User Interface” panel in future, because many people aren’t familiar with that term. (It’s more likely that there will be an “Appearance” panel, but vibration settings would fit just as awkwardly under that name, poor Ubuntu precedents notwithstanding.) And vibration has little or nothing to do with “Accessibility”.

One possibility would be to rename “Sound” to “Sound & Vibration”, but we already have three category names with ampersands (“Language & Text”, “Time & Date”, “Security & Privacy”), and I’d like to avoid more.

This situation is similar to the current placement of “Updates” and “About This Device” inside System Settings: neither of them are actually system settings, but on a small device there doesn’t seem to be a better place for them.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

This is theoretically a simple naming problem, but I know naming problems are difficult to resolve.

I don't think it's appropriate to say "Won't Fix". If you look at the bug description alone it's quite obviously a discoverability problem that needs fixing (somehow).

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Fair enough, Won’t Fix was hasty. Marking as Incomplete, because there isn’t enough information to determine that there’s a problem. Even if you took a long time to find the settings (which isn’t clear from the bug description), moving or renaming them might not improve things for people on average. Moving them might make people slower or less successful on average, and renaming “Sound” might make people slower on average in changing settings in general.

Part of the reason I’m skeptical that it’s a problem is that vibration settings are also found under “Sound” on Android and iOS.
<https://support.google.com/nexus/answer/2819577>
<http://www.imore.com/how-set-custom-alert-vibrations-or-disable-them-your-iphone-and-ipad>

In general we have the time and budget to test only high-risk designs, so for most things we rely on experience and judgement even if there’s an anecdotal bug report about them. But as design questions go, this would be quite easy to test if you wanted, because you could use paper prototyping. <http://alistapart.com/article/paperprototyping> Print screenshots of the current interface, and of the interface doctored in some way that you think might work better. Test ten participants with each (not the same ten with both!), asking them something like “Imagine that you got this new phone, and you were getting annoyed that it vibrates while you’re playing games. Where would you go here to stop that from happening?” Start your stopwatch when you finish asking the question.

[Daniel van Vugt (vanvugt)]

We could also wait till a bug has ten or so "me too"'s like bug 846374 (which is also about discoverability).