YaST/Development/New Control Center

From openSUSE

Goal

We want to redesign the YaST Control Center. We strongly believe that YaST Control Centre can make or break YaST and openSUSE. We want to set a new standard in the way how system administration tools are presented to the user. Therefore we are looking for a radical new design so that we are not just copying existing ideas. Please feel free to comment on these and discuss your ideas (even radical new ideas are highly welcomed) on our mailing lists.

Problem

In several bugreports and usability tests we see that for many users it is hard to find out what YaST module to use to solve their problem or to do the right configuration. The current control center is very crowded and not intuitive for a non-geek user.

Some of the reasons are:

• overcrowded (esp. network and software section)
• no clear tasks identifiable
• navigation
• search
• ugly
• unclear wording
• confusing

Ideas

Card Sort Study

We asked about 30 experienced user how they would sort the modules in the YaST Control Center. Find out about the procedure and results of this study.

First Brainstorming

• present modules related to actual problems and highlight them; use e.g. logfiles as source of actual problems
• present a summary of the system; distinguish between configured and not-configured modules
• create troubleshooting and HowTo guides in the openSUSE wiki which are linked to the control center
• strengthen search functionality by using tags in the modules
• use a favorites/recently used section
• display modules differently (e.g. whether they have not been used by the user, are new available,...)
• use only a search field as control center (Yoogle :-))
• Tabbed interface
• Classic and new look options

Ideas mentioned on the Mailing Lists

We moved the idea from the mailing list to an extra page: Ideas from the Mailinglist. Please add further ideas, concepts etc. there.

Mockups

From Usability Team

Inspired by GNOME

similar to GNOME control center

Tagcloudish

Tagcloudish design that combines classical elements of the Control Center with a icon presentation similar to tag clouds.

From YaST Developers

Only two pages

Design that uses two pages (basic/advanced) to reduce overwhelming number of icons at first start.

Next step in the evolution

An evolution to the previous design that adds a related modules column to show modules that don't really belong to a group but somehow make sense to be placed near to the other modules.

Enter YaST System Navigator

This design tries to disconnect a little more from the classical presentation of modules by showing a search field as the dominant interface element. Results in a different usage flow.

Influenced by KDE 4

This design is influenced by the remarkable clean up of the control center in KDE 4. By stronger categorization it is possible to integrate an overview of all categories and the top five modules into one screen. Additionally the user is able to customize his favorites and is shown related modules by keywords.