Cultural Design Themes
I said I’d give the new Ubuntu light theme some time and I’ve given a long time to looking at it and considering it. Finally I think I can post a fair blog post about it. I’m going to go with conclusions first:
The white “ambiance”: I dislike it, it’s unbalanced, uncoordinated and looks fake. When you first see it there is something not quite right that you can’t put your finger on, it looks bad, but your damned if you can put your finger on why. I think the best analysis of the components of the theme so far has got to be Jay’s post on kbps, it’s a recommended read. My thought: It looks like dirty old plastic.
What struck me at first was how similar this desktop design has to the likeness of a default Mac OSX theme, purple background, left sided buttons, soft plastic style with shiny gleam. So I talked with various community people about it. Most people could see it was an unintentional convergence of style, form and depth. It’s the spirit of the Mac if not it’s exact clone.
The buttons on the left side is a terrible idea, unconventional, forced for an LTS release they decided to do something far too experimental and invoke the ire of a lot of people. I have some people here in Massachusetts who deliver and manage computers to local businesses for a living and they were all for pushing 9.10 on their customers. But they’ve decided to be weary of 10.04 just because of the buttons, they believe it’s a _really_ bad design and the way it was done has harmed trust in the design of Ubuntu for them.
That’s sad and it’s the kind of thing I hoped wouldn’t happen.
I will be changing the theme on my own computers to a more traditional theme and I’ve asked a number of future users of the machines what they would prefer and so far none of them have said they would like the Ambience theme or the left aligned buttons so I plan on removing these default themes from the PXE boot install.
Tags: design, desktop, Ubuntu
I’ve managed to convince a number of people in my area to switch to Ubuntu over the last few years. Since I have been running Lucid for a little while, I decided I would let several of them use my laptop to see what their reaction would be to buttons on the left. After several minutes of no comment, I decided to bring the button topic up. Their response was complete indifference.
There are some interesting topics one could go into regarding both the usability of the button decision, as well as how the PR situation was handled. However, I really think the only people who care about the issue are us geeks.
Indeed your right, some people are indifferent. But then get people who are new to computers but have some limited experience with windows, they tend to be older people. But they struggle with the idea that it’s on the other side. It’s the young people I find are indifferent.
Ubuntu: Linux for the yoof.
Good point. So far none of the people I’ve seen use it have been older. In the next few weeks though I’ll be running updates for people in that age range, so I’ll have an opportunity to see their reaction then. If they complain, its easy enough to move the buttons to the other side.
Absolutely nailed it.
Ubuntu is off the rails. Time for a new project to step up.
I also dislike the buttons on the left … to me the buttons on the left were a signature for macs so for now this design decision is just a copy and a promise that something “interesting” will be coming on the right side … if that something will be something that users will use more often that the windows buttons then i think it is a good decision. but if not then …. thank god for ubuntu tweak
I also don`t like the fact that the messanging indicator applet was merged with the new sys-tray thing and the fact that i lost the option to minimize and maximize my apps to it with a single click
I was so excited a few months ago by the idea that a new, stable, robust LTS release was being released in April. To be honest, I grew so wary of all the imposed decisions that followed on design and usability [sic] while we were approaching the release date, that in the end I hardly gave Ubuntu Lucid a try during the RC period, and decided with great disappointment to switch to Kubuntu, for all discussed above and much more (I remember that the final straw was when for the umpteenth time I was uselessly overing with the pointer over a desert area in the upper right corner of the window).
At least, Kubuntu’s still freer from the restraints and limitations imposed by GNOME and happily accepted by Canonical (i.e. breadcrumbs button removal, icons removal, Appearance Preferences settings removal, removal of removal and so on with removals) and highly customizable (where GNOME reduces a whole plethora of options to a single one, if any, KDE gives you a whole plethora plus 1 more, just in case)! And did I mention it also displays a whole array of colourful icons in the system tray, the place flattened to almost indistinguishable monocromatic icons, and that the Design Team calls Notification Area, which is due to be removed by 11.04? Just unacceptable! What for: to replicate in icons (yes, yes, indicators) aimlessly the menu structure already present on the left (another position switch), and over-complicate (above all new) users’ experience forcing them to double/triple clicking just for the hell of it.
I remember reading an interesting post months ago from a guy worried about Mark Shuttleworth getting his hands deeper in design, for he recalled a tragicomic anecdote about his weird ideas on how Nautilus had to behave in the first incarnations of Ubuntu. Well, if all this purple sugar-coated usability-wise-disguised series of constraints is just a foretaste of Mark’s “ability” and taste in design, I’m happy to have made the switch in time…
As I said on my website: http://www.betterubuntu.org I still can’t believe they moved my buttons. As for the dirty plastic, it took me about 30 seconds to switch back to the human theme. The human theme looks rather nice on lucid.
I’ve had a ton of bugs in the upgrade, but that’s expected. I’ve slowly, but surely, been able to fix all the bugs in the release with work arounds.