Re: [Tails-ux] Greeter: 1st screen and quick setup

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Author: sajolida
Date:  
To: Tails user experience & user interface design
Subject: Re: [Tails-ux] Greeter: 1st screen and quick setup
tchou:
> Alan:
>> tchou <tchou@???> wrote:
>>>> The mockups I share with you today comes after this, with some extra
>>>> personnal ideas. The main thing is merge and rephrase the "welcome"
>>>> and "quick setup" screens.
>>
>> Why this merge? Without the feedback from the previous step, it
>> makes the 1st screen looks much more complicated for reasons I fail to
>> understand.
>
> This merge comes indirectly from the redesing of the "Basic settings"
> section. If we can collapse this section, we can collapse the advanced
> one too.


You are not really answering Alan's question here :)

Nonetheless I can find some interest in it.

On the previous mockups "Advanced" and "Guided" were two alternatives
that you had to choose from when you are on the Welcome screen.

The new proposal merges the advanced settings as a discoverable section
of the first screen. "Guided" becomes an alternative path to this single
and unified screen.

As a consequence I think that:

  - People are not forced anymore to manipulate those options
    sequentially (first the basic, then the advanced) as it's easier to
    go from one to the other.
  - It gives more importance to the advanced settings and less to the
    guided setup.


Still, I'm not convinced that the previous design had a serious flaw
that required such a big change now that we had a more or less
consensual proposal that we could have started implementing. And I'm
afraid that this new increment will take months again become we came to
an agreement... as we haven't been traditionally very responsive over email.

>>>> There are some comments on the mockups,
>>>> maybe there is still missing explanations to understand the proposal.
>>
>> How is the user supposed to discover that the accordion is an
>> accordion? I can't think of a GNOME UI using this principle so I'm
>> afraid it might not be coherent with the rest of the desktop experience.
>
> I think that some icons + the label "advanced settings" are affordant
> enough, but we could increase it by changing something (like the
> background color, the cursor) on mouveover (unlike Gnome 3). We could
> also add a permanent label like configure with a link style.


I think that this discussion reveals a bigger issue: whether we want or
not to follow the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines for the Greeter or
whether we want to do it in own way using GTK technology without
following their guidelines.

I've had repeatedly the impression that Alan wanted to follow the GNOME
guidelines quite strictly, and that you were more tempted to be creative
outside of their recommendations.

I'm personally more tempted to go the GNOME 3 way. Even if people coming
to Tails are probably not used to GNOME, the whole Tails desktop is
based on GNOME and following their guidelines will make our applications
(Greeter included) more consistent with the rest and easier to
manipulate on the long run.

I think that this was never really made explicit but that we should take
quite a strong decision on this basic assumption, either one way or the
other. As it will limit misunderstanding when working on mockups and
also have important implementation implications.

This is for me the first thing that we need to clarify.

For example, regarding the particular example of the accordion, we
looked in the GTK libraries, guidelines, and quite a few GNOME 3 apps
and indeed none of them use accordions to split out complex set of
widgets in a single window. To do that they rather use either Views or
Tabs (we're not sure which one exactly):

- https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/view-switchers.html.en
- https://developer.gnome.org/hig/stable/tabs.html.en

We tried to design a single window for basic and advanced settings using
Views and this is what we came up with (in attachment).

Together with Alan we also agreed that this debate on accordion vs GNOME
3 is more about the structure of those three things (Basic, Advanced,
and Guided) than about the precise content of the section (Language,
Persistence, etc.) -- apart from the minor fixes from the comments that
you sent.

So we agreed to start implementing GTK3 mockups of at least those
sections while continuing the debate on the broader structure. We think
that having the real widget to comment on will be really helpful for
polishing the minor details.

--
sajolida