I see what you mean about the current System settings having large click areas & my mockup having a tiny little down arrow to click. what about changing to this:

http://element-6.deviantart.com/art/Sys ... 1400829930

The whole of each topics line is now one big button (apart from the quick links on the right hand side obviously).

The biggest plus point that i can see is that it's less cluttered & intimidating than the current System settings (and i think a bit more modern, stylish & suited to Plasma next - particularly when someone with a bit more style does it nicely). With a bit of thought displaying any search results could work very well too, the current System settings is a little lacking in that department (as are all the System settings that i've looked at).

The biggest negative is that one click access to the sections is worse than the current System settings. With the quick links to the 'commonly used sections' down the right hand side there are at least 3 sections that you can get to with 1 click (I've done 3 per topic but there could be more - but it might get cluttered) - on the current System settings it's between 4 and 8 per topic.

ivan wrote:Can you guys make bullet-points of what are the advantages of the proposals?

That's not an easy exercise because it means to defend an unfinished draft. But given that a pro to a draft is also a con to the current system the discussion becomes straight.

ivan wrote:+ Clear visual separation of the categories (level 0)
+ Large click areas (Icon + Text)
+ A common layout amongst systems (xfce, osx, gnome, cinnamon, unity etc. - at least judging from the screen-shots I found)

Absolutely. The goal is a simple, familar start dialog to access KCMs. And therefore we have to discuss the navigation within KCM's too.

ivan wrote:+ One-click access to any module (level 1)

Basically, the goal was to have this one-click feature on level two resulting from the weird organization. But changing this makes the navigation more difficult on that level, so it's not solely a plus for me.

ivan wrote:- No visual connection between the start screen and modules
- No quick access to other modules while in one (click 'back', then choose a different module)
- Slower 2-click access to a page (level 2)

Quick access is available via 'See as well'-links. And the 'Back' button can be kept too (actually I just had no idea where to place it).

+ De-cluttered SySe view (Right now, we have a bunch of icons which does not support orientation. The idea was to make some option available at the second level.)
+ Maintainability (It should be easy to include a KCM into well-defined categories)
- Implementation effort
-- Uncommon sidebar navigation (KDE SC's default is to have an icon view left-hand for navigation. It's simple and plain. We discussed vertical tabs which have issues with text, and accordions that are quite unfamiliar and cover options. We could as well think about trees... But if we change the sidebar navigation we should to do it consistent for all KDE apps (sooner or later).

Ken's idea deals with the second level navigation issue by keeping all function at the first level and hiding them by default (unless user hovers or clicks an icon, or whatever). About this idea:
+ No or minor changes to KCM's
+ Less changes to sidebars

There is an ISO (9241-210) norm which defines usability related requirements for dialogs. It contains of:
* Suitability (the dialog should be suitable for the user’s task and skill level)
* Self-descriptiveness (the dialog should make it clear what the user should do next)
* Controllability (the user should be able to control the pace and sequence of the interaction)
* Familiarity (the dialog should be consistent with user’s expectations)
* Robustness (the dialog should be forgiving)
* Individualization (the dialog should be able to be customized by users)
* Learnability (the dialog should support learning)

I'd say we match most of this points, except self-descriptiveness.

I really love ken's idea but I would go one step further and just remove the 3 most used categories from the right of each topic since by clicking on it, one can immediately select the category that he/she pretends to go to.
It would have the following pros:
- Level 0 screen becomes really simple and concise at first look,
- No loss of versatility to reach to any category - allows the user to immediately select the category that he/she is interested,
- Clear separation between topics at the level 0,
- Clear separation of categories within the topics,

I won't have time in the next few days to look at this, but I would love to help in building the level 1 category. I think that Ken mockup would be good even for level 1.

One thing that i hadn't considered in my mockup is that you'll see every single one of the level 2 pages that are contained in 'Appearance' in the pop-up that appears when you click on the big 'Appearance' button. That means that if we're going to have 'non-expert' & 'Advanced' (which is a good idea) we'd have to have some kind of setting on the front System settings screen to modify what appears in the pop-ups, otherwise 'Advanced' level 2 pages would show up in the 'non-expert' pop-up!

prosmaninho,

I had thought that maybe those 'quick links' on the right may be a good way of displaying search results (I assume that you still think we still need a good search function).

Those three little icons in each category's 'quick links' area start off as the most commonly used level 2 pages in that level 0 category. Start entering a search term and those three links change to the three most relevant results in that category (if there are more than 3 results). If there's only 1 or 2 results then only 1 or 2 links appear in the 'quick links' area for that category. If there are no search results in that category then the whole category disappears, leaving just the categories that have got relevant results appearing in their 'quick links' area.

In the other SySe's that i've looked at, when you search there's a big change from the initial front SySe window to the 'search results' window. The only things that would be changing on our SySe front screen when you did a search would be the icons in the 'quick links' area and they could be animated nicely to make it all very slick.

Heiko Tietze,

The 'See also' section on your Advanced mockup is a really good idea, if you had it on the 'Non-expert' version too (which i think we should), then the only real difference between the two modes is the number of sections (or pages of settings) that are displayed in the vertical bar and their icon size. A while ago Firefox upated on my system to version 29, it's got the menu bar hidden by default, you press & release the 'Alt' key to toggle it between visible/invisible.

Is it worth considering doing something similar to switch between Non-expert & Advanced modes?

I think it would have 3 advantages:
1 - It would save space, we wouldn't need a separate button to switch modes
2 - It wouldn't be obvious to a non-expert user how to switch modes so modules that should be kept away from casual users (like 'Compositing') won't be easily discovered & fiddled with by people that don't know what to do with them
3 - The 'Alt' shortcut could toggle between the two modes on any screen

System settings could launch in 'Non-expert' mode which would mean that only 'Non-expert' sections are presented in the pop-up on my previous mockups unless the 'Alt' key is pressed & released to put it in 'Advanced' mode.

ken300 wrote:prosmaninho,

I had thought that maybe those 'quick links' on the right may be a good way of displaying search results (I assume that you still think we still need a good search function).

Those three little icons in each category's 'quick links' area start off as the most commonly used level 2 pages in that level 0 category. Start entering a search term and those three links change to the three most relevant results in that category (if there are more than 3 results). If there's only 1 or 2 results then only 1 or 2 links appear in the 'quick links' area for that category. If there are no search results in that category then the whole category disappears, leaving just the categories that have got relevant results appearing in their 'quick links' area.

In the other SySe's that i've looked at, when you search there's a big change from the initial front SySe window to the 'search results' window. The only things that would be changing on our SySe front screen when you did a search would be the icons in the 'quick links' area and they could be animated nicely to make it all very slick.

Hm yes, this could work!
I think the presentation of search results in Plasma 4.X is worst (since often some level 1 items are highlighted where you have not the slightest clue why, because you didn't know that it was one of the level 2 items below it that matched your search). Simply showing a list of matching level 1/2 items (another big problem in 4.X is that some level 1 items have level 2 items below them but others show the settings directly at level 1, but that will be fixed in the reorganization) is imho better than what we currently have, but of course has the disadvantage that users have no clue where to find the items the next time without search.
Therefore your idea sounds like a good compromise: You can directly show the matching items on Level 2 but users still show which Level 1 item category they belong to.

Oh wait, I just realized: If the search matches an item on level 2, how do present it, given that the list on the right of categories only show level 1 items?

Just to clarify what I understand by all the level 0, 1 & 2 stuff (and it could well be different to you!) so that we all know what we're talking about:

Level 0 - 'Common Appearance' on the current SySe, the top level grouping
Level 1 - the 'Application Appearance' module containing the actual settings pages within it
Level 2 - the individual pages within the modules like 'Style', 'Colours', 'Icons' etc

The list of 'quick links' I thought would be links straight to the most used level 2 pages such as 'Desktop Theme', rather than to level 1 modules such as 'Workspace Appearance' to make it super-easy to access commonly used pages.

The way that i'd imagined the search working was that it would be a quick, lazy way to find the setting that you want to adjust rather than training you to find your way round SySe with the mouse. It would show only results or places that you can be taken straight to to make the adjustments you need regardless of whether that's a level 1 module with no level 2 pages within it or just individual level 2 pages within another module.

I hate the way Windows 7 makes you feel a bit lost when you use the search feature - it makes no effort to show you where you're being taken to. It would be great if we could give the searcher an awareness of which module etc they've been taken to by the search results, what about changing it so that the module that you're in is displayed prominently within each module? At the moment it doesn't tell you anywhere on screen which module you're in. If you're in 'Workspace Appearance' & highlight 'Cursor theme' in the list of level 2 pages in the white sidebar then the window title bar says 'Cursor theme - System settings'. That's a bit obvious, you can see that the 'Cursor theme' icon is highlighted, why does that need to be in the titlebar? It would be much better to have 'System settings - Workspace Appearance' or even better just 'Workspace Appearance' like in Ubuntu, Gnome etc, etc... you can tell by the page style that it's SySe, why is that needed in the titlebar too?

That could work really well with the new Breeze theme where the titlebar is quite prominent anyway!

One issue that i have just thought of is that we need to make sure that the names of the level 2 pages still make sense if they appear in search results and aren't displayed together with the module that they're from. Eg 'Bluetooth > Devices' makes sense but if the 'Devices' level 2 page is picked out in search results then it would just be 'Devices' which could mean anything - the pages would need naming so that they still made sense (so 'Devices' becomes 'Bluetooth Devices')

I've just seen anditosan's mockups of the SySe front screen at it looks fantastic.

One suggestion - what do you think of having an 'Undo the last setting you changed' button somewhere on the front page?

I guess if you're keeping track of what settings have been changed for the 'Recently used' area then it's not a huge leap to have an Undo function too. It would help out Berna from the HIG/Personas thing, if she changed something and messed up then rather than hunting around looking for what she changed so that she could change it back she could just hit 'Undo'.

It could be a simple 'Undo the last thing' button or it could open a list of what you recently changed so that you could pick what you wanted to undo.

ken300 wrote:what do you think of having an 'Undo the last setting you changed' button somewhere on the front page?

Undo on the KCM level makes sense (the option is available right now and discussed in the 'needless button' thread viewtopic.php?f=285&t=120812). But I wouldn't place this function on the SySe start page because 'Restore defaults' sounds like a complete reset, and undo should be available for standalone KCM too.

Heiko,

I didn't mean have a 'Restore defaults' button on the front page.

The 'Reset' button on the current SySe pages reverts the settings to whatever they were when that KCM was opened so if you make changes and realise you've made a mistake you can just click 'Reset' & start again.

What I meant was some kind of undo function so that you can open SySe, make a change then close SySe. Then when you realise a bit later that actually that earlier change doesn't really work & you want to change it back you can launch SySe again and click on 'Undo' to undo the last thing (or things) that you changed without hunting through the KCMs looking for the one you changed.

Heiko Tietze wrote:Undo on the KCM level makes sense (the option is available right now and discussed in the 'needless button' thread viewtopic.php?f=285&t=120812).

The currently available "Reset" button is indeed something different than "Undo", because it only affects unsaved changes. That's why it's rather useless imho, as it does the same as closing without saving and then reopening the KCM.

A real "Undo" is what I've campaigned for in Plasma Active (because it would allow instant apply of settings without scaring users of accidentally clicking on something), but I got the reply that it was too complicated to implement, so I bet it will be the same in Plasma Desktop.

That's why it's rather useless imho

I agree with you there.

That's a shame about the Undo thing being no-go, it would be like a safety net so that users felt like they could change their systems without fear of doing something wrong - oh well

ken300 wrote:I didn't mean have a 'Restore defaults' button on the front page.

Anything on the first page works as an overall feature. "Restore defaults" might be an exaggerated example. I'm a friend of undo/redo, but the Apply and Cancel option is sufficient for the KCMs, IMHO.