Gnome Icons: What the Devels are up to
My friend leftyfb over on his blog has highlighted an issue with gnome that I always thought was a genuine oversight. i didn’t think that the gnome developers were seriously and deliberately removing the icons from certain menus. For the past few months, every time I went into the System menu, I thought the missing icons were because some bug that no one could find the time to fix, had crept in.
Apparently not. according to records it was a discussion by developers to remove visual queues and make Ubuntu harder to use for dyslexics like myself. Forcing us to read words which we can very easily misread and not letting us use icons in which a combination of shape and colour can act as reinforcing cues for the noun of these menus.
I know dyslexia isn’t a fun disability like blindness and deafness, but a little consideration would have been nice.
The exact regression aside, Mike points out in his blog another worrying facet that I’ve seen myself all too often in the gnome developer community. A community of disagreeableness. As I was saying yesterday in my blog post about disagreeable filtering: Being nasty and obnoxious is a poor man’s user contribution filter compared to being patient, understanding and using dialectical tools to work out problems so they can achieve as many wishes as is possible.
I don’t expect devels to say they’re good at design when they are only good at systematics. If you’ve worked out some of the science or some basic principles of design, it doesn’t make you a designer. It’s not always parcelled into simple rules and regulations. Sure, sometimes they help, but they’re at best guidelines and a good starting point and you’re not expected to use them as iron clad regulation. Of course this is an obvious warning sign that the coders have taken to design before learning anything about servitude let alone elegance.
I’m not pleased with gnome developer’s attitudes. Yes, sure, users are annoying, but why aren’t you asking them for money in exchange for listening to them? Instead you’re pretending that you’re an open community that welcomes contributions from unskilled users, but in fact want to cut yourself off from all users. A sort of Unenlightened self interest, the bastard brother of Enlightened self interest who is responsible for cutting ties between developers as users and pure users.
This is why I protest that we MUST start being honest about how progress is funded. You only have to listen to the people that control the purse strings, listening to anyone else is charity and is not guaranteed in any way. If we want to have users making a real difference in the community and ultimately getting the software that they want to have, then we MUST make sure those users have a way to pay for such services.
If we want to have users making a real difference in the community and ultimately getting the software that they want to have and not the software that we think they ort to have, then we have to listen to them and be able to ask them to pay for the time of developers.
Tags: design, development, Economics, gnome, linux, Ubuntu
Sometimes I feel like they should change their catch phrase for the next release from things like “Simply Beautiful” or “Made to Share” to “One step forward! Two steps back!” I don’t have dyslexia, but I use the icons because it’s familiar and faster and I don’t have to “think” when I want to go to my downloads folder, for example.
I’m also worried about Gnome Shell. Anytime you show off you can 4, 6 or even 20 desktops and have it a major part of the “experience” is missing the point of a functional desktop. I *rarely* use even two desktops and now my desktop might shrink every time I click on “Activities.” I don’t want to knock it completely down yet, but I feel like there’s too many areas where gnome is failing.
Isn’t this a double edged sword?
Seems to me that some governments that shall remain nameless have minority lobbyists that pay to have their laws focused on.
I am pretty certain that this would create even more epic failure than all of the might of the self professed designers we already have.
While we fritter away our passing moments worried about the mythical absolutist ‘everyone’, the world is rushing past us with more and more diversity.
What is wrong with a distribution for dyslexics that strives to perfectly meet the particular needs of that audience in ways that the jack-of-all-trades platforms cannot?
Don’t worry, Martin… our designers and artists firmly believe they can design something for everyone that works in all cases with every background and that everyone will find beautiful, elegant, and amazing… right?
Money, I’ve got money. I have a job. Please let me turn it into software that does what I want via Launchpad and Brainstorm.. please?
It is not just GNOME devs who are doing it wrong. Even Ubuntu (or perhaps Canonical) design team removed icons from the famous indicator applet (previously f-u-s-a) menu. Considering that the text size on this menu is smaller than GNOME menu I feel it is worse situation. I remember there being a bug about this and the answer was ‘as per our usability study’. I even remember the famous MPT disagreeing with that decision (either on the bug or mailing list).
And it surely does not affect just people with dyslexia. It affects normal people too. You are not alone in this situation.
Another mistake done in GNOME is done at GTK+ level. GTK+, since 2.18, by default does not show icons in menus when you are using stock menus. This has to be either fixed by application developer through code or by user via gconf editing.
I just hope that GNOME devs will realize the mistake sooner than the mistake about browser mode in nautilus.
Yeah! Usability is not important for most of the developers as it should be.
An Interface – non graphically or graphically – MUST prepare the information for the user and doesn’t throw it against the user.
the decision was taken by the art theme (the authors of the icons) and by the usability team, in consultation with the developers and the release team. and it was discussed to the death on bugzilla, mailing lists and conferences. where were you? free software is made by those who show up.
also, the icons can be re-enabled at any time: they are just *turned off* by default.
please, do a little research before entering in write-only mode and draw the wrong conclusions.
I just read the original blog post on the planet but can’t get to leftyb’s site to post a comment, so i’ll go here:
This is ridiculous. I want to know how people who care so little about the end users opinion can be put in charge of something that affects so many people.
Seriously, I am really pissed off that people are in charge of making these decisions upstream that affect MY operating system. No one has asked me, no one has even told me that it will happen. And of all the cheek in the world, they even removed the option to return to what I liked beforehand.
It’s not the fact that the icons have actually been removed that annoys me, sure, I like the icons, but I can live without them. The reasons I’m pissed are:
1) No regard for the users preference
2) Blatant disregard for the comments on the bug
3) Banning or removing people who commented too harshly against it
4) Not notifying anyone of the change or asking people what they wanted
5) No obvious research or surveys
6) Removing the option to return to what it used to be!
Is this FLOSS, or is this just a few developers doing whatever the hell they want with no one to stop them?
Most open source projects are meritocracies. If you don’t like it, learn to code and change it yourself
Why doesn’t Ubuntu just ship a patch to the default schema that re-enables icons in menus/buttons?
Perhaps Ubuntu likes it this way? GNOME and Canonical are holding usability hackfests together.
Wasn’t my point that meritocracies are a bad thing?
So why did I never get an invite? Why are all these design teams hidden and obscured? Do we all have to join every mailing list to keep up to date, or could just one person make the leap and report somewhere that this kind of discussion was going on so we had the opportunity to get involved.
Too late now isn’t it.
Hi Martin!
It would be great if you could come to GUADEC 2010 in Hague. I think it would be nice to discuss issues around design and dyslexica and how we could do better (I assume the menus aren’t the only place where we might have a bad story regarding that).
I’ll also try to attend the next Ubuntu Summit so maybe we’ll bump into each other there.
Having said that, design decisions are hard, especially when you have X million users and you always only get the negative feedback to act upon. Maybe the icon menu issue was a wrong call, I don’t know, but we shouldn’t be afraid to take the wrong routes every once in a while, because the opposite situation would be terrible.
I think there is something to what Troy says that maybe we shouldn’t try to please everyone, but it’s a tough call to decide who to please.
It was on Planet GNOME and desktop-devel-list, the two most prominent GNOME communication channels. Should have been on other world centers too perhaps (like Planet Ubuntu?), lets work together and try to make such communication happen next time!
The IRC channels are #gnome-art and #gnome-design on gimpnet. Welcome!
No, I’m sorry, that’s not a valid argument.
What you’re trying to say is like my government holding an election but only inviting the mayors of cities. Then afterwards they tell the rest of the population of the country “Where were you?” – but still try to label themselves a democracy.
And, for your information, the labels *cannot* be re-enabled any time – because the plan is to remove the interface tab of the appearance settings.
My point is that the *average Ubuntu user* wouldn’t be able to change the code! They wouldn’t know how, can you imagine my Mum trying to edit upstream source code when she doesn’t even know how to drag and drop files?
The fact is that there are 10 million Ubuntu users out there, most of which aren’t involved in the community. Most of which will never hear of this change or have a say in it, or be able to do anything about. One day they’ll just upgrade to Lucid and wonder where the hell their icons have gone.
I’m not saying we should contact every. single. Ubuntu user, but a couple of surveys on ubuntuforums.org or the redhat forums couldn’t hurt. Hell, it only took my project a few days to get an enormous amount of feedback.
Popular Linux blog sites are usually too happy to help out projects with feedback from their reader base as well.
The fact is, if you’re a developer, you need to be a researcher too – and too many people ignore this fact, hence why we end up with a lot of useless or duplicated applications.
That’s a great idea, and I think they should. I’ll talk to some people and see if we can make it happen.
Psst, GNOME developers, you know how you guys are too busy or whatever to conduct usability surveys on what the real users would want?
Well, I did it for you by emailing a popular Ubuntu blog with everyday Ubuntu readers. Take a look. The poll results are interesting, too.
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/02/missing-menu-icons-what-are-gnome.html
Did anyone ever claim that any specific features of Gnome or even Ubuntu were decided democratically or even via representative governance? Whoever encouraged you to believe that should be ashamed..they set you up with the wrong expectations.
What exactly is the ideal communication workflow here? Where exactly do GNOME developers need to announce that a discussion is taking place each and every time a change maybe made in order to ensure everyone who is potentially impacted gets their chance to argue the pros and cons of that change?
Do they really need to reach down into every single linux distribution that includes GNOME and announce every single change that is up for discussion? Isn’t this the sort of thing that your chosen distribution’s participants in Gnome development should be doing as a project liason to communicate to you as a distribution user? Who are the members of the Ubuntu community who are also active GNOME developers that you can rely on to filter information down into Ubuntu communication channels? Who from Canonical is going to the GNOME conferences? Are they reporting back to the Ubuntu community appropriately about changes under discussion? Why isn’t Martin reaching out specifically to those people and asking them to do a better job of being the bridge across projects?
There is no one place to send an notice that will catch all the Martins in the world… all the people who are potentially impacted by a design decision and want to impotently shake their fist in rage
Since Martin’s argument is essential accessibility with regard to dyslexia impaired users, the only real question is this, was this change communicated to gnome’s accessibility team for comment. If it was then the developer’s have done their due diligence and the question becomes does gnome accessibility team have a dyslexia resource member who can represent the needs of dyslexic users.
As a user who has no disabilities i like the toned down icons. However, you raise an important point. Perhaps the best place to address this would be in the Ubuntu (whichever) installer? At an early stage perhaps it should as the user if they have any disabilities or impairments and which accessibility options would they like enabled?
Yeah! The idea is great! It would be very useful.
Benjamin: A poll is not a usability study, far from it. An important rule in usability studies is that “users don’t know what they want/need”. We didn’t base our decision to remove icons from menus based on our own usability studies, but based on articles that were already avaiiable about things like readability of text and the meaning of icons.
Because I’m really tired of being the target of rants and blamed for “lack of openness” i would suggest we hold a real usability study about this at GUADEC 2010 and finally put this behind us forever.
The argument that having no icons in menus would be bad for people that have dyslexiia is an interesting one and one that we did not consider at the time. I would like to see this tested as well.
“I even remember the famous MPT disagreeing with that decision”
That’s incorrect. On the contrary, I was one of those involved in the initial decision to reduce the number of icons in menus.