On Fri, Mar 27, 2009 at 4:40 PM, Brian J. Murrell <email address hidden> wrote:

> I just fail to see how unsolicited application pop-ups that cover a
> major portion of my screen real-estate is good UI design.

It's not good design. I don't think the Canonical team is even suggesting it's good design. That's what I don't understand. I've been watching this conversation for a while, and now that I saw Mark make his comment, what I feared is true.

Some things we all agree on (maybe?):
The notification area shouldn't be a place to display open tasks; that's for a window list applet. If your task doesn't need to notify the user of new events, or a change in status, then it has no place putting an icon in the notification area.
Tasks with frequently changing status that don't have panel applets like to put icons into the notification area. I'm looking at Gajim right now in my notification area. The application has a setting which allows me to have the icon appear at all times, or only to appear when there are events I haven't given attention. The latter is, what I can tell, the intended purpose of the notification area. A quick glance shows me if there are any new messages since the last time I checked. No envelope? Back to ignoring it. (Usually sounds do the trick, but they aren't working for me right now :)

Now here's where the developers are starting to change things:
"Bubbles" as they used to be called, or as I used to know them as anyway, were little, tiny border- and decoration-less windows that popped up near the notification area (or in an area of our choosing). These bubbles were to give more information about an event that needed attention or a change in status than a simple icon change or animation. These bubbles became actionable (click on me to address the event, or ignore me to address it in your own time, and I'll go away in a few seconds). These bubbles became numerous and there was (still is) no standard for their content or the actions performed when clicking (or right clicking) on the bubble or the icon itself.

There was talk that the lack of standards led to security issues. "Click here to address this issue" was construed by some as click on this bubble, instead of the icon it was supposed to draw attention to. When clicking on the bubble did nothing, some blamed the idea of having bubbles at all as being too confusing because of the lack of standards, rather than addressing the poor UI of that particular bubble. Couldn't we have made clicking on the bubble and the icon do the same thing? Some people see the lack of a specific, coherent standard of content and click behavior as freedom put in the developers hands for how they want their user to interact with their programs and vice-versa. I'm guessing that 'some' definitely includes individual application developers more than developers of the desktop itself. The issue became that notifications were falling by the wayside, that some bubbles were more critical than others, but since there was (is) no standard, people weren't giving critical notifications their due.

I certainly see where the developers of the desktop as a whole are coming from here. Bubbles were non-standard, notifications were being missed, and now some developers are starting to use their own bubbles, bypassing libnotify altogether (think quod libet and a few other audio players with their own song change notification OSD). Now you've got bubbles over bubbles, bubbles that don't look like other bubbles, and no consistent way to manage all of your bubbles, what events trigger a bubble, what clicking on a bubble does-- you get the idea. All because someone wanted to give more information that a simple icon in a notification area could give without being clicked or hovered. And all these bubbles caused people to wait for a bubble, because if an icon appears without a bubble, the icon must not be that important.

I think the issue the 'community' represented here is trying to express is that the chosen answer to this 'swamp' of icons and bubbles was to revert to what the bubbles were trying to avoid in the first place; bordered, decorated windows that appear in window-switcher lists, window list applets and other places where non-actionable notifications shouldn't be. We've all gotten used to these handy bubbles, and in many places, information wasn't presented to the user in detail before these bubbles came along; we all dealt with new icons appearing in the notification area. And all of us hate pop up windows. Let's face it; popping up update-manager is *not* the same as notifying me that updates are available. That's like saying opening my feed reader is the same as notifying me that one of my feeds has updated, or popping up my mail client in the background is the same as notifying me that I have new email. This point has been made a few times, actually.

I personally think the issue should be to create a standard for icons in the notification area. We have all (some of us may be lucky enough to avoid windows altogether) seen windows system trays filled with a dozen or more icons that never present the user with a change in status or event notification and serve as nothing more than a cross between a Mac OS dock and the windows taskbar. This seems to be what the developers that chose to remove the icons were hoping to try to get away from, but I personally (and others) think removing the icon from the notification area is not the answer - something about the baby and the bath water...

Now I've seen the emergence of the "indicator-applet" which seems to me to be an attempt at a notification area with standards. I feel like there's a bit of wheel re-inventing going on. We already have an area for notifications. Most applications I use that can put an icon in the notification area but don't really need to give me the option of it being there in the first place (banshee, rhythmbox, gajim when there are no pending events). If the issue is clutter, get on the individual developers. The way I see it, in a desktop without a notification area, the only way to notify a user is with a pop-up window. It seems to me that the notification area was an attempt at progressing past pop-up windows. We've now gone from getting rid of automatically starting a program and placing it on the desktop, to a simple, unobtrusive icon in an area meant for such notifications, back to popping up the application. This seems like a step backwards to fix a problem that has come about from cruft and misuse of a good idea, not progress. I feel like the developers could have gone and filed bugs with the applications that sit in the notification area for no good reason if they felt there was clutter that was ruining it's purpose rather than removed an icon that seemed at home where it was. Take up the issue where the issue is.

Here's the kicker, and really I think the argument that isn't being had: I think it's sad that Mark's (and directly and not so directly, others') response to this well thought out argument that has been made by many people before me is "this is an attempt to fix a cluttered area so that we can draw more people who don't want to bother to learn how their computer works, and want it to JustWork for them". What I see this as is an attempt to draw users who don't want to learn anything about their computer, including required maintenance, to the Ubuntu community. This is not the kind of behavior I think should be encouraged in users of computers, and in my twelve short years of using linux as my desktop, I've noticed once consistent thing: when you change a program to encourage these "why doesn't it just work" users, while simultaneously alienating the "expert" power users that Mark mentioned, your project gets forked, your expert users jump ship, and your project dies a slow death. Let me say this again: we went from pop up windows to a better system, but because the better system requires the user to learn a little bit about how their computer works (hey, when an icon appears in the notification area, I need to pay attention to it!), because we hadn't come up with a good way to explain to the user the notification area and how some notifications are critical AND because the notification area is being used for things that don't belong there, the answer the developers have is to go back to a pop-up window.

We've all seen these users before, and they treat their cars, appliances, phones and every other bit of technology they own in the same exact way. I am perfectly okay with these users staying with Windows and Mac OS. Linux has always been about feedback, investigation, community - engaging the user. My friends that have taken a shine to the Ubuntu installs I've put on their computer are the curious ones, the ones that understand that increased productivity doesn't come for free. Computer software requires maintenance and that's all there is to it. The argument that the notification icon wasn't enough of a notification to users or was too confusing means that the UI surrounding and explaining the icons themselves needed improvement. Of course we can't expect first time users of a new operating system to understand what a new icon means exactly, but does that mean we shouldn't expect them to learn what the notification area is for? Or to investigate the new icon? Or not to ignore it completely when it says there's a security issue but they couldn't figure it out fast enough? If you really want to address that issue, you have very descriptive information presented to the user in a first-time only basis, like what happens when you run Synaptic for the first time. Engage the user. If he/she learns how something works the first time, problem solved, and you can keep everything unobtrusive after that. You can also address the developers who are putting icons in the notification area that don't belong there.

If you want to be "bold", Mark, then get on top of the developers creating the swamp, lay down the law as the people who code the desktop that the applications have to interact with. Don't tear the whole thing up and go back in time to pop up windows. The real step backwards is trying to 'get free software everywhere' while encouraging poor behavior from your users. You get free software everywhere by making it better than the other options, by engaging and teaching your users, not by catering to the lowest common denominator. Expect more of them and they will give it, but make decisions based on attracting users who want everything to 'JustWork', and I'm going to start lumping Ubuntu in with Windows and MacOS who care more about the size of their user base than anything else.