Marc Watson:
> Dear sajolida, all,
>
> this is a one-time post, I'm neither going to waste my time nor trying
> to annoy you:
Fair enough. Mine will be a one-time answer as well.
> It's the old fight between designers and engineers, ppl who put
> (IMO pretty arguable) "beauty" over functionality and ppl who hold it
> vice versa.
>
> I am sick of it and usually just mod my stuff to usability, don't waste
> my time to submit and discuss with beautyists. Anyway, my thoughts for
> once:
I really don't mean to put "beauty" over "functionality". I'm not that
kind of designer :) At least in my work in Tails, you can call me a
perfectionist and a annoying nitpicker but I don't think I'm a beautyist.
In the matter at end I argued against a "noisy" and "unprofessional"
look. And here are three arguments:
- UX research shows that people are more ready to trust products that
look polish than rough, and as Tails pretends to be both a secure and
usable product we're concern about whether people feel secure while
using it. I'm not saying we're perfectly usable and perfectly secure.
We're very far from both, but at least we try to find a good balance.
And dealing about "polishing", the details count of course.
- Consistency of phrasing, terminology, and style is also important
not to confuse the users and avoid behaving or communicating differently
with no reason across the same product.
- I want to be careful with the tendency to always add stuff to solve
UI problems. The less information we give to the user, the better they
will get it. This screen is already very verbose (mea culpa, I was the
one to write it) so before adding more stuff and making it even more
verbose I wanted to check whether we could also remove stuff and improve
the overall impact by doing so.
In my opinion all these points have more to do with functionality (as in
"getting the message through") than beauty (as in "being pretty").
> On Sat, 30 Apr 2016 15:36:44 +0000
> sajolida <sajolida@???> wrote:
>> I'm fine with the bold.
>>
>> I don't like the caps nor the asterisk as it make the sentence look
>> noisy and unprofessional.
>
> as the syntax does not seem to allow selective font size (especially
> within a label) I used other techniques to apply the IMO *needed* stressing
> to statements.
> Removing these for beauty or whatever removes the stressing. Did I
> mention that I made this patch to achieve the stressing (protect the
> noobs)?
Right, but your patch splits the sentence in two different widgets and
thus, in two different gettext strings for translators. I don't think
this will work for every possible languages.
So in 712b050 [1] I instead put the whole sentence in bold. But thanks
for finding how to do this because I wouldn't have found it on my own!
[1]:
https://git-tails.immerda.ch/liveusb-creator/commit/?h=feature/11393-deletion-visibility&id=712b0504675730c610bbd3616c598c7a9d62bd6c
>> We also used the word "formatted" as we thought that most people are
>> familiar with this notion, so I'm not convinced that adding a third
>> verb ("delete" to say the same is worth it).
>
> Well, Tails tries do dumb down users (just see the freakin new wizards
> at https://tails/boum.org that annoy all power users).
I acknowledge the fact that, with this first release of the installation
assistant, we switched from being nice to power users to being nice to
newcomers, and I understand that this can be annoying for the ones that
feel left out. But since the release, we've been working actively on
solving these issues, see in #11024, #11269, #11209, etc.
> So the targeted
> noob users do NOT know that a 'format' is equal to a total loss of all
> data. Just had one in chat on #tails today.
The word "format" was suggested by DiddlySquat in #8866#note-17 who is
professional technical writer with years (decades?) in the field, so I
trusted him on this one. I also remember some of my non-geek friends
knowing the word "formatting". But your concern is valid and this word
might be useful for some but not other and that's why we have two terms
referring to deletion in this sentence. We had "format" and "lost", and
now in ece2928 [2], with your contribution and the comments from
Spencer, we have "format" and "delete". I'm confident this can still be
further improved.
I didn't mention the persistent storage because I thought people who are
installing Tails for the first time don't yet know what this is about
and might get confused.
[2]:
https://git-tails.immerda.ch/liveusb-creator/commit/?h=feature/11393-deletion-visibility&id=ece292890f1b733030f52d7bd978a3988f8d1df7
>> Instead it might make the warning even more visible to remove "that
>> you install on" from this sentence and make the whole sentence in
>> bold and still fit in one line?
>>
>> Do you want to try this?
>
> no, my formatting puts visual focus on the important issues. I'm not
> going to waste my time on beautyfying anything if this weakens
> intended functionality.
You had put 56 characters in bold in a sentence of 108, wrapping over
two lines. We now have 57 characters, all in bold, over one line only
(in English at least). I expect many more people to take the time to
read and understand the new shorter sentence.
>> Let's also be clear that this screen is already way to verbose and
>
> no, it isn't. The expert can take these few seconds, the noob gets the
> important info pushed by bold and stressing - once more "beauty" vs
> functionality.
>
>>> 2) What I didn't find but much appreciated: Please remove the input
>>> focus from Install option to nowhere or to "Upgrade by cloning" so
>>> an accidental key press (SPACE / ENTER) does not run the most
>>> destructive option but has to be chosen actively (no matter that
>>> there's another tiny dialogue before).
>>
>> I don't know how to do this either myself. But if we change the focus
>> to prevent mistakes when pressing enter, we might put it on link to
>> the documentation which is the most neutral action we have here :)
>
> I supplied two patches (that you'll dislike, I guess - beauty affected)
> to https://labs.riseup.net/code/issues/11390
Cool! I also created a different ticket for the phrasing issue only,
that's now #11393.
