A few GUI ideas. Better for touch-screen, scalable.

[animaniac]

Since GNOME 3.0 is already in the works, im calling it topaz+1, although its not necessarily specific to any desktop environment.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/ScalableGUI_topaz%2B1

[alex.rayu]

The mockups look quite gigantic. They can't be like this for everyday use. Maybe turned on on demand when using touchpad as primary input device.


Desktop layout. I don't like panels, taking so much space on the screen with large buttons. That takes from the precious work space. At the same time, there's lot of emty space on the panels. Both at the top and at the bottom. A calculator and a terminal icon are simply covering an empty half of the panel. There are no desktop icons? If you remove that FireFox window from the mockup, the gloaming emptyness will be shouting. To cut the long story short, you have covered up quite a few serious defects here.

Menu Structure. It resembles the current, but with huge icons and no text. Should you have an actual set of items in the menu, it would not only make it go beyond the screen (say, in the "System" submenu), but it would also make one guessing where's what. The user will have to spend time hovering the mouse over items to see what items are.

On the second mockup. An expanding menu taking the whole screen with gigantic icons. I really feel that your thrust for touchpad makes it otherwise unhandy.

Window Navigation. You only have three items fitting on the screen this way. When there are three, the amount af left and right arrows and icons becomes distracting. Need to use something like CoverFlow. Unlimited, easy previewable amount of windows.

A general observation is that I can see how large things are easy for fingers. When doing a presentation or reading a book, or carrying a hand-held device out with keyboard off or detached, that will be handy. But in usual work, that is very un-ergonomic. I would suggest a widget or a button that would transfer Ubuntu into this mode when clicked, and would send it into usual mode when touchpad is not used as a primary input device.

[animaniac]

@ alex.

You seem to have taken my rather poorly gimped conceptual illustrations a bit too literally. The proportions weren't taken into too high a consideration, its meant to demonstrate the idea of navigation , and not implementation.

Seems also that my descriptions weren't clear enough, but let me clear things up:)

The idea of the system menu is to condense it to 4 selections from which you can easily choose sub selection. The current menus are overly cluttered, all you have is basically places, settings, help and end session options divided into two menus, (Places and system), they don't tend to change in size, the only menu that changes in size is the applications menu, which has been moves to the bottom in this concept.

The size in of the icons in the system menu is blown up a bit, but the thought is that it would be scalable, consider the fact if the menu would actually be the size of the conceptual drawing then it would be just right for touch navigation(even though in the drawing its very disproportionate with the desktop). In reality it would be appropriate to have all the icons the same size, that is just big enough on the screen for comfortable navigation.

The thing on the bottom is not a panel, its a dock where the user arranges their most used apps as they please. the fact that only two icons are shown in the right dock demonstrate only a possible way of arranging things.

I left the desktop blank, since i had no thoughts on the concept, theres nothing to add, widgets and icons already exist as a concept.

The arrows with app icons are also not accurate, a cover-flow like implementation would be the desired, as specified in the text. I just felt it unnecessary to draw it to demonstrate something i thought was apparent.

I'm pretty sure it would be much more ergonomic when implemented, this was meant to show more how it would work and not look. (like, you know, patent drawings and such, demonstrate the function and not the appearance)

[alex.rayu]

I design in Photoshop. Will be glad to help should it be required.

[animaniac]

cool, feel free to make a realistic version of the mock-ups, if you have the time to. any added realisim to help people see what i mean would be appreciated.

people judge by what they see, so having better images would definately contribute to the idea.

[tretle]

I made a blog post about this awhile ago - http://tretle.co.cc/blog/2009/01/30/gnome-30-and-user-interface-design/

[animaniac]

tretle:

Nice post on AWN. covers alot of what i was talking about.
Using AWN would probably be the best way to go to get this in the works, especially with the good ammount of applets etc. for it.

Added a link to your blog post @ -Menu structure.

[alex.rayu]

Love AWN.

[tretle]

The link to the blog post doesn't seem to be there from what I can see.

[animaniac]

mysterious, link missing and previously fixed errors were present. must have lost my connection last time i was editing, fixed now. thanks for noticing.