On Saturday 22 December 2007 14:17, Stephan Kulow wrote:
I thought prototyping in ycp is easier than creating mockups in gimp, so I coded http://ktown.kde.org/~coolo/yast7.png - but it looks weired - suggestions are welcome ;)
A completely different aspect of this - we had discussed and rejected a similar approach quite some time ago (during one of those countless times when we had to redesign the installation workflow for the umpteenth time): This is the first dialog a user gets to see during installation. Well, not exactly the first; first comes the boot menu and then the boot screen (typically the newbie version trying to hide techicalities such as kernel messages behind some colorful graphics). Anyway, this dialog is the first thing the user gets to see of the YaST2 installer. Then this dialog hits him in the face multiple times. There is the "welcome" message. Then there is some static text that does not really give any information whatsoever: "Please answer some basic questions to finish the openSUSE installation in very little time". IMHO it does not serve any purpose whatsoever. Then there is the combo box for the language - and it has become very verbose: "please select your language". (Notice that some time ago it was agreed upon that we use concise language in those dialogs and dispense with "please" etc.; all occurences of that were purged during years of proof reading and introducing consistency). Then there is the apology for requiring the user to accept the license agreement (it's RichText with a hyperlink - how does that look in NCurses?). Will the corporate lawyers accept it like that? Will it stand up against courts of law where we need it? Or aren't we required to force the whole license agreement (which nobody likes to see, much less read, except maybe some very bored amateur lawyers) upon the user? Then there is the check box for the license agreement. Then there is more static text about the release notes. Realize something? Our user has just been confronted with a lot of text in a language that is very likely not his. Unless he speaks English, of course, but the purpose of this dialog is to establish communication with the user -- making him welcome AND letting him select the language. We had intentionally reduced that dialog to a bare minimum in all our installer redesigns. It's about choosing the language. That's the primary purpose. A secondary purpose is to make the user feel welcome. But how can he feel welcome if confronted with lots of text in a foreign language as the first thing he sees? And if there is considerably more than a language selection, everything else is in the wrong language. Seeing a lot of languages where I can recognize my native one I can feel comfortable picking that one. Most users will at least recognize everything else as other languages. There is no need to feel left out, to feel not understanding something significant. This is different with this design: The language selection has been reduced to a very minor thing in a dialog that has become pretty complex. A user cannot easily tell what is important; there are just too many things. It's no longer just language selection and giving some kind of welcome. It's now - welcome - language selection - hint about the license - hyperlink for the license - check box for the license - hint about the release notes - hyperlink for the release notes IMHO it's way too complex. It breaks the concept of our installer - presenting one thing at a time, guiding the user through a complex process. Just reducing the number of installation dialogs is not an objective all by itself. We also have to consider complexity. CU -- Stefan Hundhammer <sh@suse.de> Penguin by conviction. YaST2 Development SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) Nürnberg, Germany -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: yast-devel+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: yast-devel+help@opensuse.org