Hi,
intrigeri:
> You mean the advantages/downsides in terms of UX here, right? I'd love
> to know what downsides you're thinking of, apart of the one that
> you've already mentioned in this thread, on which I've been focusing
> so far, since you said it was the biggest one.
I see the following UX downsides of replacing the Applications menu with
the Activities overview:
* Longer response time. If the system is under stress, or just low-
performant, it can take multiple seconds to open the Activities
overview, while, in my experience, the Application menu always opens
in under a second.
* Harder to find non-favorite apps which they forgot the name of.
For the Application menu, I second the experience which I think
sajolida already described somewhere: When a user wants to find an
application, they first guess which category it could be in and look
through the apps in that category. If they don't find it there,
they choose another category and look through that, and so on.
In the Activities overview, the user would first have to find the
"Show Applications" button, and then go through the list of all
applications, which will take more time compared to going through one
category. Another pitfall is that they have to notice that they can
see more apps by scrolling down or clicking one of the dots to the
right.
I don't think that the Applications menu provides great UX, but I think
for many users it's better than the Activities overview.
I also think that the "apps sorted in categories/sub-folders" concept,
which you say other operating systems have dropped already, makes more
sense in Tails than in other operating systems: Other operating systems
come with fewer pre-installed apps, so it's easier to look through all
of them. And for apps the user installs themself, it's easier to find
them, because it's more likely that they remember either the name of it
to search for it, or the icon to more quickly spot it in a list of all apps.
Cheers
