Redesign of GNOME main menu and application browser

From openSUSE

Christian Jäger proposed various solutions to improve the GNOME main menu, which in the current state is believed not to be intuitive enough. The reasons of this conclusion are:

• The main menu opens a second window to allow the user to launch applications not contained in the main menu.
• It's slow
• It's not what the user expects

The mockups proposed by Christian are reported in bug 274817

Recently Christian added some proposals to improve the current state of the application browser, as he introduced in this discussion on the GNOME mailing list at openSUSE.

Here links to new mockups are summed up:

• Improved main menu with integrated application browser
• Improved main menu with integrated application browser (second proposal)
• Improved application browser with tabs

Also think about supporting enhanced composite features due to the use of Compiz as seen in bgo 419840.

Here some screenshots of a Preferences dialog for the main menu and the application browser are available.

Christian:

"Thanks, Alberto. Here is a short summary:

Application-browser:

Two things with the current design of the application-browser don't seem to work for many users, as can be seen in reviews of openSUSE:

• People don't use the category-links or search-filter on the application-browser's left side, thus scroll a lot to find an application
• People don't use right-click in the application-browser, so they never discover that they can add applications to their favorites, nor do they know that they can uninstall applications from within the application-browser

Tasks:

• Make richness of application-browser more obvious by use of icons/text ('Drag here to add to favorites')
• Force users to find their applications faster by using tabs for categories and icons for sublevel-categories. See a demonstration of the menu sported by ASUStek's Eee-PC for an example: [1]

Mockup from above:[2]

Main-menu:

• To completely avoid the startup-lag of the application-browser, its whole functionality could be embedded into the screen-estate main-menu if the number of icons in the menu was reduced like suggested above
• To reduce clutter, the hardly used 'Places'-tab could be substituted by a 'System'-tab that comprises all status-indicators and links to administrative functions and log-out options that now are present on the right side of the main-menu
• One 'switch-off' button should be enough for the menu's main view

Mockups from above:[3][4]"

• Clutter could be reduced even more by making a dropdown menu out of the applications|documents|systems buttons. Combined with ASUS-launcher style subcategories and perhaps automated scrolling the menu could be very effectively simplified: Very simple main-menu with integrated app-browser. If we dare imitate ASUS-launcher even more, we get something super-easy to handle: ASUS'd version