New GNOME Human Interface Guidelines now official – and obviously some people hate it Red Hat's Allan Day, a member of the GNOME design team, has said that the project's new Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) are now official. The GNOME HIG, as Day explained back in May, was "fairly out of date" both in terms of technical changes for GNOME 40 and GTK (GNOME Toolkit) 4 and also what he called "contemporary design …
Mate and Cinnamon. Yep, same here.
The thing is, the latest GTK can still be used by applications running on Mate, Cinnamon, etc.
From the article: "contemporary design practice."
I have to wonder what they meant by this... are they thinking "new shiny" or "2D FLATSO": or "hamburger menu" or ??? because (to me) THAT would be WRONG THINKING.
And apparently Firefox and Libre Office are sticking with a slightly more traditional look (i.e. no menu in the title bar).
I have considered a COMPLETE rebellion, writing a library that decorates windows to look like XP, and then FORCING IT (for my applications at least) on ALL windows platforms.
(For Linux and BSD, you can just choose the right desktop theme, one that's not 2D FLATSO)
If there's one design practice that MUST be followed, it's USER CHOICE
If there's one design practice that MUST be followed, it's USER CHOICE
^^^^^ This, a thousand times, this.
AND
Don't ever force a change on the users.
If your "new shiney" is any good, people will switch to it when they are good and ready.
If its not good, crawl back into your basement and die - don't force it on us grumpy old farts! We have other things to think about than "where the fuck has the damned button gone this time!!!!"
I didn't remember that XP came out of the box looking like something other than Win2k until you wrote that. Each time I installed XP, I turned off the theme service within the first few minutes of running the new OS. When Bob wrote "looks like XP," I thought of the way XP looked for me, which was like 2k (only with worse icons).
> Make it Win2K
Indeed, Win2k was for me the pinnacle of Windows GUI design: I just edited it to make title bars, sliders and window borders as narrow as possible, removed all the silly animations, and got an unobtrusive, clean UI which didn't steal too much screen real estate or processor time from what really matters. I kept using the "classic" look till I left Windows altogether (because of Win8).
Also, the utterly predictable menu structure ("File", "Edit", and so on) was a boon when helping computer illiterate friends and relatives by phone: The feature you were looking for was always where you expected it to be. How uncool!...
Obviously that couldn't last. Why settle for perfect when you can have flashy and "trendy".
Finally people who share my thinking. The best mac OS was either tiger or snow leopard.
Firefox and LibreOffice stick to their "traditional" designs because they WORK, and do so well. Even GIMP, which let's not forget was what gtk was created for, uses gtk 2 for a reason: it's familiar.
Actually, GIMP uses GTK 2 because they've been too busy with the internals to keep up. They're doing the GTK 3 update now.
I hope that they can avoid that Gnome thing with the title bars usurping the window manager's decorations. Whether that looks good is a matter of personal preference, but it jars like hell unless you're all Gnome all the time.
I expect they couldn't imagine that you wouldn't be.
Isn't that just what a menu descending from the menu bar *does* ? Operational groups as individual menus, commonly used options on the drop-downs, less commonly used or more complex options on sub-menus?
Or is that a bit to grandpa for the current generation of UI designers?
Yeah, absolutely. Gotta have a touchscreen paradigm. Those big-screen workstation folks who aren't prepared to stick a rubber glove on their selfie stick are just sooo last century.
Mind you, that giant touchscreen in the Death-by-PowerPoint Mortuary is great for discussing the best walk to Starbucks; surely the killer app for GNOME.
Learn?! LEARN?!!! Who "learns" stuff. If you do not emerge from the womb knowing the emacs key bindings then nature has not chosen you to be a programmer. Although we will tolerate those smart enough to look in the manual and creating bindings to taste, as well as those who nature thought to endow only with knowledge of vi. We do, after all, have to tolerate diversity.
Indeed, obscure, not referenced features are the means to separate the elite from the rabble. You wouldn't want the proles to come pretending they are equal to you and your elite skills, would you...
Don't tell me it isn't true, I have often been scoffed at by the true-bred computer gods for not mastering all the secret handshakes and obscure command line commands I might only use once in my life...
The GNOME save file dialog does not even have a text entry field, nor is there any button for it. You have to know CTRL-L is the hotkey to make it appear. When people begged the devs to make a button for it or to otherwise make it discoverable, they said NO... it's really more of an Easter egg, not an actual feature.
Something as essential as a box you can copy-paste a path into is an Easter egg.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's why GNOME sucks. Not just this one thing, but the kind of thinking that makes people believe this is a good idea.
Ladies and gentlemen, that's why GNOME sucks. Not just this one thing, but the kind of thinking that makes people believe this is a good idea.
I thought they took the decision to suck eons ago. Hence the attitude to those who had the temerity to ask for wireframe moves and resizes. The developers refused to believe that there was a usage case which wasn't a user running on a local laptop and that no Linux users are ever managing rack fulls of servers on the other side of the planet. Even bloody Windows recognises a remote desktop and switches to wireframe move/resize. For Gnome 3 you can't even get a plain background without going to the command line. Presumably when you stick your head up your arse your inner linings have a subtle stipple pattern they felt the need to reproduce.
If you do not emerge from the womb knowing the emacs key bindings then nature has not chosen you to be a programmer.
:-)
The thing that always amuses me is that whenever you get two or more emacs users together at least one of them will come up with a subsystem they consider vital and use daily that another has never heard of.
> The guidelines state that "primary menus are typically placed at the end (in Western locales on the right) of the header bar,"
Marvellous! As if it weren't bad enough on other DEs, with "minimize" and "maximize" right next to the "close" button, now if you want to do *anything* in the app, your cursor is going dangerously near the close button every time!
" your cursor is going dangerously near the close button every time!"
Mind you, with most apps these days given names like "Drivell" and iCrap" (yes, we know that. Please do it in the woods), and taking up all your bandwidth telling everybody else what you just did (shame they don't bother to tell you), that is probably just as well.
The "close" being next to the "maximise" has been a Turing Test for UI for decades now: if you put them together then I automatically know that you know nothing about UI and can be ignored, along with whatever Mickey Mouse certificates you might wave about.
Luckily, you can redefine them in older Gnomes, but you shouldn't have to.
One of the many things the AmigaOS designers got right was giving the window close button a corner of its own to reside in. Also one of the few things the MS team got right with earlier versions of Windows, before someone in Redmond had a brainfart whilst laying out the 95 UI...
In WindowMaker I have one close button top right and a "minimise" button top left. If I want to do something more than that I just right-click the titlebar and choose from the many options there. Even then I normally use keyboard shortcuts to close and minimise... I have been bitten so many times by the close button being next to maximise elsewhere.
My biggest "accidental closure" bugbear is with my wife's chromebook which has a touchscreen and hardly any screen bezel... I inevitably close whatever's open as I open the lid!
Will also cause fun for anyone trying to talk a user through using the app in a different locale to the one the helper is running - "OK, move the pointer up to the top right of the window and click on the three lines... oh, erm, do you see something that looks like 3 lines anywhere? on the left? umm yeah, OK, I guess try clicking that instead"
"now if you want to do *anything* in the app, your cursor is going dangerously near the close button every time!"
...and to help minimise the number of clicks users must perform in order to reduce the risk of RSI, confirmation dialogue boxes have been removed.
“ … showing every possible control all the time makes an application harder to use….”
No it doesn’t!!! Forcing the user to dig about in dialogues hiding behind “advanced” buttons and buggering about with what people are familiar with and pissing about moving stuff and following MS (because they’ve never f&£@ed up their UI, have they?) is what makes stuff harder to use.
The way these design philosophies are put out there and followed as if they were actually correct its unbelievable. Just leave the shit alone (after putting everything back to how it was 20 years ago before you started messing it up).
why must every call to put things back to SANITY (i.e. before gnome 3, chrome's ridiculous "paradigm", and Australis and "the ribbon") 'need' to be met with an extremist view of what that might be like?
before "the ribbon" you typically had dockable tool bars that you could turn on and off. I usually turned them off and used the appropriate menu (right-click in particular).
maybe it was possible to turn your entire display into a bunch of clickable buttons, but I doubt anyone actually did it.
and a specific preference dialog box that's not hierarchical enough (a tabbed version might be a good start) is a design problem, not one for determining what your OS or desktop or UI standards should be like.
(or were you saying something different?)
Yeah, it pisses me off that my toaster only has one setting to burn the toast. It should just have each possible resistance value from the rheostat marked on it, and separate rheostats for each side (or even zone) of each piece of bread. Plus options to change fonts.
The most important benefit of a good design is to distill from the universe of possibilities the ones that make sense, and prioritize them in the way that is most likely. A designer that can't do that needs to move to Redmond and join like minded folks there.
"Unless the option I want is on line one I go diagonally and frequently there goes the sub-menu back to sub-menu hidey land."
It's possible to implement sub-menus usably. Mac OS Classic did: once a sub-menu appeared, it stayed up as long as the mouse pointer was moving towards it, even if the pointer strayed onto a different main-menu item. So moving on a diagonal Just Worked.
I just tested, and Firefox on Ubuntu 20.04 is even more conservative about leaving up sub-menus (I'm not sure which software layer(s) are responsible for that good behaviour, but judging by Gnome Terminal, it's probably Firefox :/ ).
As I recall, that sub-menu handling is one of the usability details that was lost in the transition to Mac OS X. (Another was the right-size button, which Mac OS Classic had instead of maximize; it resized the window to exactly hold its contents (or maximized it if the contents were too large for the screen).) I'm reminded of this two-decade-old Joel on Software post on the dangers of rewriting from scratch.
It's for clicking so you can drag the window around the screen, as well as displaying the application name (which many applications no longer bother doing anyway). Look at the example in the screenshot - on the current version approx 80% of the title bar is available for you to click in order to drag the window. On the "contemporary design practice" version it's about 10%. Usability takes yet another step backwards because of the fashionistas.
> It's for clicking so you can drag the window around the screen
For the phone is everything generation this is not something they seem able to do.
Every window is instantly opened to full screen mode. Even if that results in massive black borders because the working part of the application doesn't resize like that.
When you tell them they need to look at several windows at once and that is why they have windows they just get confused.
Really? I just see poor quality software around. Web apps with clunky UIs that makes everything harder to do. Desktop apps written with "portable frameworks" delivering ugly widgets, despite needing half a gigabyte of "runtime". Overly simplified widgets designed for touch interactions that require more mouse clicks than ever. Removal of menus replaced by labels scattered around you have to find if they are clickable or not trying. Lists that no longer respond to typing by searching but require a separate search box. Settings pages without Save/OK and Cancel buttons to accept changes or not. Development tools became worse as well at designing UIs, since they believed HTML was a model to imitate, and not a document display language badly used to try to deliver something resembling a UI.
Actually people were forced to accept lower quality software, with less features, and slower, by web applications that still can't cope with the needs of complex applications so they need to simplify UI and force user to accept them - rebranding desktop app to the "Classic" line...
"The reason I use KDE over GNOME is having the menu in the with the window bar."
Be aware that KDE guys are introducing hamburger menus everywhere :-( like in recent versions of Dolphin. Luckily there is still the option to show the "old" menu bar. The problem is that every time I install a fresh KDE Plasma I have to reconfigure the desktop in order to get rid of the new "simplicity". e.g. the not so modern default Dolphin configuration (without panels, hamburger menu, home restriction, big icons) is really awful, just a copy of MacOS/GNOME. On the positive side, Plasma remains as the most configurable desktop, that's why I still use it.
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I'm starting work on a UI framework called Oui designed for just that: it's cross-platform, adaptive and will soon be themable. Put it on a touchscreen, it gets a tablet or phone UI depending on window size, it respects DPI settings, and more relevantly for this conversation is adaptive. I know kde users like choice, menubars and everything in front of them, so the UI reacts to that. It will be themable eventually, so that's an added plus. On Windows 10 it has the ribbon interface, and on Windows 11 it follows Fluent design. On OS X, it uses client side decorations, toolbars and will support the global menu bar. On Big Sur it uses client side decorations and the sidebar visually extends vertically the entire way down the window. On gnome it uses your beloved CSDs and shit in the titlebars.
In Mate, pluma does this too (indicates file name). Firefox also lets me know if I am running it as a different user (I do this a lot for sandboxing). This may be a feature of the desktop, though, to add the text "(as username)" to the title bar text. Still helpful.
Yes, the title bar HAS a use, and it should be LEFT THAT WAY.
<blockquote>
This may be a feature of the desktop, though, to add the text "(as username)" to the title bar text.
</blockquote>
Yeah, that's Marco the window manager doing its thing. I used to mess around with a custom desktop environment, and I'd start X and marco as root, and every single window (the server side decorators at least) would say (as kettle) after it.
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Gnome 2 -> Gnome 3..........surely a huge retrograde step!
*
Gnome 3 -> Gnome 4..........why should I care?
*
I've hated Gnome 3 since it was launched. Sure....visually slick.....but lots of added mouse clicks to get anything done!!
*
Gnome 4.......just say "No"!!
*
XFCE4 is perfect!!! .... doesn't get in the way, lightweight.....what's not to like?
XFCE you say? Ahem, sorry my friend but I have some really terrible news I need to break to you...
https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/01/xfce-4-16-client-side-decoration/amp
https://forum.xfce.org/viewtopic.php?id=13689
TL;DR; XFCE is getting client side decorations. Although they might not be putting hamburger menus on apps they distribute, I think you're going to find that lots of 3re party GTK Apps are going to have hamburger menus and other horrors that you can't turn off nor configure :'(
Title bars tell you about the window they are on top of. They ARE NOT PART OF THE WINDOW! That's why their primary functional job it to allow you to manage the window - move it, minimise it, close it. If the app wants some menus, then put in a menu bar, like a sane person.
This is why server-side decorations are The Right Way.
However, the New Geniuses have determined that an app with a lousy UI design must be allowed to be lousy all over your desktop, because the app writer is such a genius.
Oh hell yes! Bad enough just adding menus into the title bar where a single-click on the top level menu does nothing worse than bring the menu into view, but when UI undesigners start adding stuff where a single click actually does something (such as saving your document, undoing/redoing the last action, or whatever other stuff Office 365 will quite happily do without warning if you click in the wrong place whilst trying desperately to move the window around) things have gone too far...
My pet hate is the gesture stuff, where you can't just grab a title bar and drag a window because if you do it wrong it will maximise or minimise the window instead.
And then there're those deep menu structures where you have to carefully and accurately follow each row to get to the next level, like a tightrope walker navigating a power distribution station on the 11kV wires.
I haven't really enjoyed desktop environments since KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2 and simply don't use them any more mainly because the alternatives are too inefficient (poor usability, poor use of hardware resources).
I think the problem is that there is no "innate knowledge" on what good usability is. When it comes to UI, there is no such thing as "modern" either.
- You have those that have only used Windows. So go for the Windows 95 style
- You have those that are in love with macOS and want yet another Apple theme
- You have the tablet weirdos because they think it is "modern"
- You have the simple gang that believe every UI should be for 90 year olds or 3 year olds
And yet the *only* usability study ever carried out on open-source desktops was from Sun Microsystems and the JDS Environment (Basically a Gnome 2 fork) carried out in 2001. (I think this is it but much of it is bitrotted https://people.gnome.org/~calum/usability/ut1_report/participant_mix.html)
Can we not just provide a massive survey for the world to complete and then just go for the most common request? I am happy to change my habits a little if it is worth it. At the moment Gnome 3+ is just too bizarre and niche.
The work Sun carried out was the opposite of a massive survey. They actually used experts who know what they are doing and talking about to make recommendations that fed into the original HIG and overall structure that made Gnome 2 fantastic.
So much today is cobbled together using A/B testing and seeing what users like rather than applying any science which actually makes things easier and better. i.e. developers end up providing faster horses (or Homer's car) instead of a better form of transport.
Yes absolutely. They asked their staff if i recall and they were likely the sort to have experience with Win32, CDE, Gnome, Gnome 2, etc. Their feedback was very suitable.
However I think the large global survey is the best we can do for now. Mainly because if I am honest, if the usability study was only carried out within the Gnome foundation, we would just end up with more of the same unusable weirdness.
Unless I am overlooking someone. Who would you identify as a good group for study? Perhaps there *is* a known group of experts in the field that are experienced with all UI systems since the dawn of computers.
I read that when Apple designed the original Mac UI they tested it with new office hires. At that time few would have had much experience with computers and none with GUIs so they were able to find out what worked best without the subjects having prior expectations.
My protocol for conducting a test would require three people for each test.
A tester who has no experience of the product being tested and a list of things to be achieved.
An expert from the design/development team. The tester is only allowed to ask and the expert is only allowed to answer questions of the pattern "Where does it tell me how to xxxxx?"
The third person is an invigilator whose nominal role is to enforce that rule but in fact is there to prevent violence between the other two.
While I hate GNOME 3 and went from 2.x to Cinnamon, I'm sure there are plenty of people who like GNOME 3. Now there will be another fork or two from people who like it and hate the changes coming. Further fragmenting the Linux desktop.
Say what you will about Apple and Microsoft's GUIs, at least they know everyone will be forced to go along so they are forced to be a bit more circumspect about making big changes (except for when Microsoft went insane with Windows 8) Linux developers don't give a shit, they feel like they can make as big of changes as they want because people who don't like it can fork.
One wonders how many Linux desktops we'll have after another 20 years and few more complete revamps of GNOME's interface.
The benefit of separating desktop layer from the underlying OS is that the user can continue using whatever it is that they think works best for whatever it is they need to do. Where the desktop is integrated users have to accept whatever brain farts the vendor inflicts on them, whether it works or not. I see no indication that this in any way inhibits proprietary vendors from fixing what wasn't broken to any degree at all. In the FOSS world we can just ignore it.
I'm going to defend Gnome 40. Was running PopOS happily but with 21.04, found myself unhappy with the increasing divergence from Gnome 3, and the glitches. Switched to Fedora and am loving the vanilla Gnome 40 experience. Slick and easy to use, with very few pain points.
I agree with the criticism of weird UI simplification, and covering the title bar with controls is an annoyance too, but this is a trend across all OS at the moment. Instead of going deeper on the things that make desktop better than mobile, designers are attempting to make desktop as limited as mobile.
As it stands now, I rate Gnome 40 higher than macOS since they tried to make it look like an iPad with Big Sur.
As soon as they introduced the mangled abortions called 'Unity' and 'GNOME 3.x', I started searching for alternatives. Cinnamon was only half-baked at the time, LXDE too clunky, but XFCE gave me everything I needed, with minimal complaints. That's what I've been using ever since. Nice to know that they decided to take one of those mangled abortions, put it into the food processors and spray the resulting sludge all over their users. Thanks but no thanks, GNOME devs!
If you see that Linux is actually becoming a viable platform for every day use and the numbers of users of your operating system steadily go down.
Then you learn they are all moving to Linux.
Then you learn than these systems are mostly developed by poorly paid people often not paid at all.
Then you check your company bank accounts and you see you have billions of idle money.
In theory how much money would it take to pay off influential people in those projects and ask them to slowly drive them off the cliff?
....but they do like to be obstinate about not admitting their mistakes...
- Many people want a Windows-style task bar and Start menu
- Windows should have min/max buttons and title bars
- If your application is complicated enough to require traditional menus, it isn't actually a problem
I don't know what user research these people did, but if they asked the questions about, I'm sure 95% of the public would agree...
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""Insanity specified… How else would you come up with a filechooser no one can use, or an OK-Button of a dialog in the window title bar."
What ? The HIG advocates for this ??? Thanks but no thanks. I already must deal at work with home developed shit apps that do that.
So, your day is OK button to the bottom, as it's been for decades, and once in a week, I need to fire up this home craped app, and every time I scroll to the (far) bottom, before saying "Ah crap, it on the top !" GRRR.
"Few would argue against the idea that consistency of design and appearance helps users to navigate an operating system and its applications, so the guidelines are important."
Sure, few would argue this. However, many people use multiple platforms during their day. Me ? 3: Android 10, Win 10 and MacOS.
I'm already all over the place with Android 10 putting OK at the top.
You cannot disrupt people full day by assuming they would use *only* one platform. It this was the case, yes, adaptation would be quite fast.
But this is *not* the case !
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