Re: [Tails-ux] New Greeter: need clarification of what the "…

Hi Susan, hi list!

Susan:
> Thanks for the thorough explanation.

… and thanks a lot for sharing your insight!

> From a user standpoint, I like (4),

Noted.

> or if I understand it correctly, (2) making the
> choice 2-step, opt-in, where first the person chooses to match the UI language to
> their own preference (French), then sees the French calendar and opts to change that
> to Japanese format with a second control if they want to.

This is an interesting idea, I hadn't thought of it. I like it!

One potential problem though: I have no idea how the GNOME Settings
would behave in this situation (it might be that they would tell the
user that Japanese formats are already enabled, and then it might not
be crystal clear how one can switch from "Japanese formats except
time/date" to "Japanese formats everywhere"). Alan, could you please
prototype this quickly and show us how this would look like? If you
can't, just let me know and I'll do it myself :)

> The main question I have is how many people would prefer to see, for example,
> a Japanese format calendar in Japan when they speak French. It seems pretty edge-case
> to me.

Agreed.

> Is the rationale that they want to do visual pattern matching with local
> other calendars?

> I would think that the errors caused by unfamiliar calendar formats would outweigh
> the benefit of showing an unreadable local format. I know when I had a German wall
> calendar, for example, which starts the week on a different day than in the USA,
> I made errors in planning so often during that year that I had to hide the box-grid
> part of it. Very often, not having to do the extra mental translation is the better
> choice for UI controls. ("Don't Make Me Think")

This could be one rationale, but I agree it's not a very strong one.

Another rationale could be: "I'm scheduling future events with local
people and we're using week numbers to do it"; in this case, it
matters whether weeks start on Sunday on or Monday, and it could be
good to show me a calendar that matches the local one in this respect.
IMO this is not a strong rationale either: speaking for myself, even
though I'm certainly not the average (current or prospective) Tails
user, 1. while travelling for a short period of time in the USA, I'm
more likely to be scheduling future events remotely with people living
in the place I'm from (and then I need a calendar with weeks starting
on Monday, not a US one); and 2. if I'm at home, I often schedule
events with groups of people who use different calendars, so we have
to use exact dates and not week numbers to avoid ambiguity.

The strongest rationale I can find for displaying time/date in
a format that does not match the user's preferred language is: "I live
in a country where the most spoken language is not my preferred one;
I prefer text in Tails to be in my preferred language, but for most
practical organization purposes, having the time/date displayed in the
way that's standard in the place I live in is more useful and less
error-prone". This is a use case I care about a lot. Let's see how the
various options support it:

* Option 4 allows me to do that with a second control once in the
GNOME session.

* Options 2 and 3 might behave the same as option 4, but this remains
to be verified (see above). If these options make it hard or
confusing to choose time/date formats with a secondary control in
the GNOME desktop, then I think that's enough to drop them.

* Option 1 optimizes for this use case, allowing me to choose this
behavior in the Greeter; but it harms almost all other use cases
I can think of, which is why I've initially rejected this option.

Cheers!
--
intrigeri