Re: [Tails-ux] Greeter localization UX [was: Feedbacks from …

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: tails-ux
Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] Greeter localization UX [was: Feedbacks from Fiodor]
Alan wrote:
>> Personally, I would start by removing the locale list and leave the
>> keyboard like this. The use of this one is definitely quite more
>> obscure that "language" and "keyboard".
>
> "Locale" could be renamed "region" or "country" or something like that.
> It as also useful, e.g. when we'll have our custom clock applet it will
> be used to fetch the right timezone for a french speaking person in
> Canada. But anyway I think we already dropped what's useless so now it
> we want to simplify more we need to drop useful things. It's a matter
> of: is it useful enough for the complexity it adds to the UI?


You cannot deduce the timezone from the local. Just to give an example
English - United States has nine timezones.

I'm interested in continuing investigating if there is a real usability
impact of not proposing the locale on the first screen. But I have the
feeling that we've done that in the past (at least maybe partly) so it
would be worth writing that down somewhere if we reach a conclusion.

As far as I understand "locale" is mainly used to configure mission
critical parameters such as: number formatting, date formatting, default
currency, paper size, measurement units, etc. Maybe I'm forgetting stuff
here, please help me.

Like en_US would use Letter paper and Sunday as first day of the week.
And en_UK would use A4 paper and Monday as first day of the week.

In the context of Tails, I'm more and more in favor of removing this
from the first screen as I think that it is:

- Little useful. You can live with en_US when working on Tails if you
are used to en_GB. And we can document how to change it for people who
really need it. We would need concrete examples of problematic results
of having with locale deduced from the main language.

- Suspicious. Tails is about anonymity and I think that having to
click your country in the main screen might look weird for many user who
won't understand the implications of this (which is very little). Is it
where I am from? Where I am living? Is this information used to track
me? Even more when I see that we ourselves have problems understand it :)

- Accurate. If I'm a US citizen traveling to the UK what shall I put
as locale? US and have my default paper size wrong? Or GB and have my
usual measurement units wrong.

References:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locale
- https://wiki.debian.org/Locale

>> And also, since the keyboard is used to typed in the persistence
>> passphrase, I think it should be possible to change it from the first
>> screen (maybe using another popup widget or something). I don't know
>> how to type my passphrase on other keyboard layouts!
>>
>> But maybe I'm insisting on having the keyboard on the first screen
>> only because I use this myself every day.
>>
>> Can we try to brainstorm a bit and maybe find important groups of
>> users for which selecting the language won't give them a valuable
>> keyboard layout by default? Maybe French speaker in Canada? Do they
>> use the French keyboard?
>
> There's a swiss keyboard different from the French and German one, but
> that would be possible to guess from language + region (locale).
> Selecting the keyboard alone is mostly useful for users that are
> traveling as Lunar highlighted.


I'm all for keeping the keyboard on the first screen, even more after
what Lunar pointed out.

>> I like this idea as well. It would fix the problem that I raised in my
>> previous answer to tchou about having a visual feedback on whether
>> persistence is enabled or not.
>>
> So do we agree on that?


I think that the final set of widgets for persistence is still being
discussed further down in the thread. But we're getting somewhere...

--
sajolida