Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

It's odd that the author is an interaction designer, but goes on such a rant about keeping a feature that proved to work badly when tested on actual users. I'd say actual testing should trump whatever intuition you have about what works well.

Sure, he theorises that the reason is doesn't work for users is because it hasn't been implemented properly everywhere (which the GNOME developers also state), but "we should expend effort on getting third parties to adhere to the HIG" is a classic cop-out: "things would be better if we would just do them better".

Sure, if you can show that the reason third parties do not adhere to the HIG is lack of effort from the team, and you have reason to believe that there is a way to increase the amount of effort spent on that other than saying "just do it", then by all means, go for it. But if that's not the case, the only valid conclusion is that the desired state might not be possible, and removing such a feature is the only proper course of action.

It's like park architect that create what they think are beautiful paths that surely everyone will like, only to end up after some months with with organically created paths made by users walking on the lawn.

The best way is to create the park with no built paths, let people settle in for some months and then come and build over the paths they created themselves.

By that logic you define the park as a part of the way from A to B and whoever comes first and is part of the majority who wants to travel from A to B through the park without casually strolling will define the way. What if the park is supposed to have a few loops and not-directly-diagonal paths to encourage lingering around?

Also, maybe I'm just the stereotypical boring German but I usually try to not use the man-made footpaths if I just have to walk 20m more... Of course that's different for really "useless" 2m x 100m stripes of lawn in the middle of nowhere where someone just didn't notice that everyone will have to cross it, but of course there are exceptions to every rule.

In chicago, at Illinois Institute of Technology, they had a park in-between the residencies and classrooms; when they decided to build a main center (McCormick Tribune Campus Center) at the park, they (Rem Koolhaus) tracked the pathing that students were naturally taking to cut through the park, with the assumption that these were naturally optimized routes to important destinations. The building was then constructed such that those pathways persisted. This worked out quite well, in usage. (except some of the administration doesn't actually grasp this concept, and arbitrary block off routes... most often for their security circus)

>whoever comes first and is part of the majority who wants to travel from A to B through the park without casually strolling will define the way

I'm not sure about whoever comes first; people don't normally follow paths based on lightly treaded footprints in the grass. Hell, you watch people cutting across the grass and you're not going to see them just line up.. They walk to their destination, and enough people to do so over the same path (presumably, because its optimal, or close to it), and the grass dies, and a pathway naturally emerges, and then you get your lines. It wouldn't be about which person arrives first.. it would be about which destination appeared first. The pathway would be naturally created for it, and then if a different, but nearby destination appeared, they'd probably re-use the pathway rather than to create a new one. A sufficiently distant new destination would likely create more pathways though.

>What if the park is supposed to have a few loops and not-directly-diagonal paths to encourage lingering around?

There's nothing stopping that; just don't interfere with the optimal paths. There's no reason you can't have more paths (it's not like you're putting fences so they can't intersect..), but certainly its unreasonably to have fewer paths than what people will naturally use.

Also, what is this supposed to business? It's a design/aesthetic choice, and if its unreasonable to have given the conditions of the environment, it would be utterly moronic to put it in anyways. If the designer doesn't have the authority to not be subservient to whatever is supposed to be, then its likely the stupidity of the bureaucracy. This then isn't question about what is good, its about what the authority thinks is good, and by how far its willing to force it onto the population.

I applaud your example, but "park between residencies and classroom" is exactly what I meant. It's nicing up the area that's being used daily by loads of people with a deliberate path. For me "park" usually means "recreational area that doesn't happen to intersect the main pathway". And if it does, yes, sure, please make the direct route accessible so not every bit of lawn is treated as a footpath.

Maybe I'm more thinking older cities like where I live where they sometimes convert old graveyards not being used for 200 years and having many graves of well-known architects, inventors, etc to parks, but not in the "play football on the grass" parks, but shady paths to take a stroll and sit on a bench.

Also even if every app on this planet supported it properly, you should still listen to the users. If they feel like it's wrong that the menu is disconnected from the applications main window, you can come along and go "but most apps have multiple windows and the actions in the menu are application specific, not window specific" and feel really smart about it, or acknowledge that this might be an artificial rule that while technically correct still leads to inferior UX. Because our simple dummy brains just get more confused by the fact that this menu seems entirely disconnected from the application than they would by the fact that the menu is arbitrarily fused to a random window of the application. Really most of the time it's not even that random because many apps have just one main window while the others are tool boxes, settings windows or other dialogs you only open occasionally for a short moment.

Using MacOS I often forget there's a menu at the top of the screen. Because I'm so used to apps that have in-app menus (Chrome, Slack, ..)

I think the author is confusing two different things, the app menu and the app name indicator (one has to click the indicator to raise the menu). I thought the plan was to remove the menu, not the indicator. The author defends the "Appmenu" because it serves as a landmark, "on Gnome 3, I can always tell exactly where I am". To serve that function, one only needs the indicator.

Yeah that's one of the more direct criticisms I had as well, just like the author

- not realising that (though this is an assumption from me) the most common workflow in GNOME is for applications to have a single window, i.e. users not being aware of distinctions between windows and applications. - thinking that you can only interact with focused windows. The result is that on multiple monitors, you don't need to be constantly aware of which window is focused - except to know which window's menu bar is currently showing.

That said, in broad lines I'm mostly annoyed by the author's trivialising the reasons for things not being the way they'd like them to be, and placing their own intuitions over actual user experiences - as an interaction designer.

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