[Sugar-devel] [DESIGN] Restart

[Bernie Innocenti]

People in Paraguay complained for the removal of the Restart function
from Sugar 0.88:

 http://trac.paraguayeduca.org/ticket/672

I suspect it's just natural user resistance to any UI change, so I asked
for rationale.

The change was requested by dsd, also without any good rationale to
justify it:

 http://bugs.sugarlabs.org/ticket/1206


I'm posting this for public discussion of this design issue, but I
suspect the discussion will not go anywhere without some user data. When
I'm back to Paraguay, I will ask my testers who have been using 0.88 for
3 weeks how they feel about all the UI changes:

 * Buddy menu reorder (control panel last)

 * Removal of restart

 * palette open delay shortened to 0 seconds (experimental)

 * frame hot corners disabled by default (experimental)

Anything else we would like feedback on?

This story IMHO brings back the long-debated topic of testing UI changes
with users. There's a chicken-and-egg problem, of course: we can't do
user testing until we write the code, apply the patch, build binaries
and install them on a statistically significant portion of our
user-base.

In my opinion, we should let dubious UI changes happen and revert them
if we get negative feedback: taking the risk to piss off a few
early-adopters is the only way to avoid a design paralysis.

-- 
   // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/
 \X/  Sugar Labs       - http://sugarlabs.org/