Re: [Tails-ux] #16990: Update our list of "Favorites" applic…

Hi,

sajolida (2020-03-04):
> segfault:
>> I don't like the idea of removing favorites which we had for a very
>> long time. It forces users to change their workflow, and there is no
>> easy way for them to change it back, because we don't have a
>> persistence preset for the favorite apps. This seems like bad UX.
>>
>> IMO, if we want to remove apps from the favorites list, we should also
>> support to customize it.
>
> I kindly disagree :)

> [...]

> I also don't want to block improving this list until we have a way of
> customizing it

For me, like many changes we have done or could do, it relates to how
much we optimize for our current users and how much we optimize for
our potential/future users. It's often hard to find a good balance
here: we have plenty of good reasons to avoid alienating/losing our
current users; and we have plenty of good reasons to broaden our user
base (e.g. it gives our work a bigger impact, which makes the world
a better place and is more rewarding to us; it's probably our best bet
to make Tails sustainable economically on the long run).

IMO, forbidding us from changing things until users can customize them
back to the previous state leans a little bit too much towards
optimizing for the current habits of our current users, which makes me
wary about it.

> because I think that it will be technically complicated,
> controversial (intrigeri really wants to get rid of this whole
> Applications menu),

I believe the "Favorites" topic and the "removing the Applications
menu" topics are mostly independent from each other, because the
very same "Favorites" are used by:

- the Applications menu (status quo), which we're discussing here
- the Overview
- extensions that display the Favorites sidebar on startup, or permanently

Improving our list of "Favorites" applications will improve things for
all these possible desktop designs, so I doubt there will be any
friction here :)

> But I'm fine with not removing anything for the time being if it makes
> it easier to move this discussion forward.

I can live with this trade-off until it becomes a blocker for other
important things.

I would like to propose a slightly different compromise: instead of
removing 3 launchers, remove "Terminal" only. I believe it's useless
to the vast majority of both our current and future users, and
I expect the more technical subset of our users won't have problems
finding one of the 3+ other ways to start a terminal. This would give
us one slot to add a new launcher there next time we need it, and thus
avoid having to discuss this again too early (and who knows, once
we're there, perhaps users will be able to persist their changes
to the list of "Favorites" so we'll agree more easily :)