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Originally posted by Turbine
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It is totally OK for new generations of UX developers to try to top and change the GUI paradigms as long as it brings progress. The problem is while they are attempting to change them, it does not bring much better GUI solutions and very often makes them worse.
A desktop environment should be a helper, offer fast access to as many as possible features but MOST importantly do it while NOT getting in the way.
GNOME today does not really shine in this matter. And this is not only GNOME.
The arrival of smart phones and tablets brought new requirements: restrained graphical real estate, no keyboard, no mouse, touch interface. The GUI software engineers came up will very smart solutions for the portable Desktop. The problem started when these solutions started to overflow to the desktop. A portable device using touch is utterly different from a PC with keyboard and mouse.
Trying to wed both into common solution is an abysmal error, e.g. Windows 10 where they are mostly spending their time these days to bring back PC desktop ways of doing things.
A real appraisal of a "new" GUI is:
- How many steps do it take to do the same thing compared to others.
- How easy is it to discover new features/commands without RTFM (Read the Fonderwul Manual).
- How long does it take to learn to use it, again without RTFM.
- A desktop environment is a utility that gives you fast and simple access to apps and documents, not a goal in itself although it is natural to appear to be a different view from the people writing DE (la "tête dans le guidon" as the French say.)
The Windows/Menus concepts were pretty good at it. Then icons. So a user could easily customize a stock DE with built-GUI to add menu options, icons on the desktop or main menu bar and so on. GNOME 3 did not bring anything in this matter, rather removed features.
Welcome to the shiny new concept of Activities. This thing brings nothing other than making access to apps a modal affair while in other DE like Mate access to apps is a one click and move trough an hierarchical menu affair. In addition if a user wants to put on the main menu bar or on the desktop her most used apps, OS applets and documents, she should be free to do it intuitively, without having to read the DE desktop manual nor having to extend it with additional plug-ins. The conclusion is obvious: add well established and proven UX solutions to modern GNOME and you see right-away that Activities are useless. You could get rid of them and would not change anything in the usability of the DE.
Windows 10 is also good at disorientating the user. The Settings "panel" is a mess. Windows can have no borders. If for instance you are a Teams user, you're reading a thread, there is no border at the bottom and it seemingly continues with whatever is in the window below the Teams window. It is guaranteed that sometimes this contents will look like text or graphics continuing the Teams thread and it's only after a few seconds you start to wonder what the *&^%$#@! the totally out of content data is. The *&^%$#@! also applies to what I think (for a second) of the UX engineers that came up with this. Rhaah! Great job UX designers, you fracked it up beyond what I thought was possible in the name of "unifying" the GUI through all devices. There is a reason why the original UX engineers concluded that windows need borders on a desktop PC.
Same thing with V and H scroll bars: not needed on portable desktop because users use their fingers. Let's show the thumb to express the relative position you are in a document, but that's it.
Again, while this is very good and perfect on a portable DE where in addition the real estate is limited, the thing had to overflow on PC desktop. This means that the poor smuck with her mouse has to know and "trust" that there must be a scroll back down arrow in the bottom right hand corner of the windows contents. Totally *&^%$#@! And it only works because people have seen scroll bars with their 5 active areas for decades. BUT it does not work with embedded scrollable areas which a user might miss not realizing that the area has more data. Same story with the windows growth box. It's ironic that the time, human resources and money spent to imagine and invent a mouse driven UX get thrown to the trash by the inheriting generations. Even worse: the scrollbars appear as a half-with gray area with a barely color differentiated color thumb, with not indication about what they are for. The only effect is to make it more difficult to click on them with a mouse. That's an improvement?
The wrong reasoning: mopeds and 18-wheel trucks are doing the same thing: moving on the road, in addition trains are very close cousins. Fiat Lux! Let's make a "unified GUI" that will work for all of these. Predicted result: a disaster.
It's obvious that many companies do NOT want to have to spend money on multi-UX teams: one for the PC desktop, one for the portable and one for the browsers. So the UX designers are not 100% guilty.
Maybe these same companies should revise their unofficial hiring policy of avoiding to hire over 50-yo people and enjoy the guidance, the DO's and the DONT'S of UX from people who had to invent it from scratch who could also deal with portable and browser UX with their past experience. Because man, there is a desperate need given the current state of affairs that looks like the remains of a battle field from the WWI Eastern Front before they cleaned up the destroyed hardware and gather the thousands of dead bodies.
This is how modern GNOME and Windows 10 Desktop should be seen: two DE that tried to revolutionized DE concepts and crashed somewhere in the middle of the flight. Both utterly failed with anti-patterns that negate the advancements created by the people who originally came up with with windows with actual containing borders, menu bars, round corner buttons, modal vs floating dialogs, etc.
Microsoft started with menus, then added the icon bar for the common functionalities. Somehow this transmuted into no more menus and replace them with ribbons. I'm still trying to see the improvement here for a PC DE in terms of UX. Think for example about how you learn the keyboard shortcut for each command. Menus were so good, weren't they?
I noticed the same evolution in the browser versions. In Firefox for example, what are the new major features/functionalities that appear in the last decade? On the other hand, the GUI "flavor" always changes. One can wonder why and (like the story above) the number of steps to do something often increases.
That's why people use Mate in this particular context: they know that there is something better than UX regression.
Hopefully I answered your question.
Although I use GUI and UX interchangeably in a few sentences. The former is mostly about the look and elements such as windows, the latter is about ergonomics. The latter is more important. The apparition of portable devices threw a wreck into the ergonomics of desktop PC.
So thank you Mate developers for making Mate exist and flourish.
The saddest thing is that Gnome vs. Mate hotly discussed threads will continue to happen. Pop-corn still has its usage.
PS: pardon my English, it is not my mother tongue.
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