On 2/1/21 2:34 PM, Sasi Olin wrote:
Am Mo, 1. Feb, 2021 um 12:15 P. M. schrieb Ancor Gonzalez Sosa <ancor@suse.de>:
That opens a question - what can we do to prevent our users to get lost in the new UI? For me, that actually splits in two questions:
1) What can we adjust in the UI to make the transition smoother and/or to improve usability in general?
I really think the new UI is an improvement, however I do have a few small gripes I guess: * I don't really see the value of "All Devices" view, the sidebar does its job there
We have discussed that several times and we decided to keep it for "backwards compatibility". That is, not changing too much at a time. We could indeed consider killing the "All Devices" entry of the tree or maybe just killing the tree and replacing it with some kind of filter. But all that seemed like going too far in just one iteration. Let's say that would be phase 2. ;-)
* In case a user has only one device, why not automatically select it as the main view * It's impossible to tell the disks apart in the sidebar: users recognize their disks by the size and the disk make/manufacturer, not by a randomly assigned drive letter, and a sub suggestion to that: * I know 2 lines instead of one there may be controversial, but also maybe think about it, since it could make it more readable if implemented correctly (though a nightmare for people with hundreds of disks, view option?)
Good point.
* Does it make sense to show the disk itself in the view if an user has selected a disk in a sidebar already (this may break with context menubar stuff?)
That was a conscious decision that actually brings a lot of consistency to the whole UI. It may not be obvious at first, but try to kill that first line and then come up with an organization of the menus that makes obvious sense in all situations. It's not so easy. Moreover, that first line serves as some kind of "title" to give context to the whole list of partitions. That approach also ensures partitions are always displayed as nested elements of the disk and never as stand-alone elements. That also improves consistency a lot. And last but not least, that first line saves the users from too much jumping in the UI if they want to find actions that affect the whole disk.
* Does the user have to go to the $device-type view (where $device-type is raid, lvm, bcache, etc.) to add the type of device, maybe it would be better if the sidebar had "Add $device_type" if there are 0 of a given type of device (add device on the menubar? add device under the sidebar?)
Actually that's one of the problems that are solved by this new UI. Is not needed anymore to go to the RAID section to create a RAID. The Add menu is always there and it always allows to create a RAID, LVM, bcache, etc. No matter in which screen you currently are. We just kept the corresponding (now redundant) "Add Whatever" buttons on each section for backwards compatibility because we assumed some users would report a bug if they didn't find them there.
* The $device_type name in the sidebar is a title, it would make sense for it to be relatively small, which icons definitely break, maybe it would be wiser to have icon on the devices and not the titles of the groups to make them stand out better
Maybe. This goes again to the sidebar (or filter) discussion we want to have in the future, after the users are finally used to use the menu and the nested tables. Phase 2, do you remember? ;-)
2) What can we do to communicate the change better to all possible users?
https://github.com/openSUSE/news-o-o is fairly easy to contribute to, considering yast.opensuse.org works more or less the same way ;)
Sure, getting the content there will not be any problem if we agree that's the way to go.
The Partitioner is not the only part of YaST under heavy revamping, so whatever are the answers I expect them to be useful in general for YaST.
It is a big change and it's very appreciated all things considered, I may want to make some changes to how things look now though to make it better looking beyond just UX changes ;)
Cool! Cheers. -- Ancor González Sosa YaST Team at SUSE Linux GmbH