Whether you like the Unity interface or not, it mostly depends on your personal preferences. But Ubuntu Unity is often criticized for many of the design decisions that went into its making. Two of the most criticized decisions are
1. Global Application Menus
2. Side placement of the Launcher
Some people say Mac and Win were the inspiration but something tells me its not only about inspiration. There is a reasonable amount of logic behind these decisions and a lot of careful thought process went into making such decisions.
Getting into the minds of the developers and designers help us understand the reasons why certain things end up the way they are and why certain decisions were made. Let's try to reverse engineer the thought process that eventually led to these decisions.
Display Screens
For a long time, the standard TVs used the aspect ratio of 4:3 (also referred to as 4x3, 1.33:1 or standard).
The Aspect Ratio is a way of describing the display screen size. It is a ratio of the longer dimension to the shorter dimension of the screen or you can simply say width of the screen to the height of the screen given in pixels.
In US, this ratio was chosen for TV displays because early Hollywood movies used this ratio, thus making any movie easily viewable on smaller TV displays in homes.
This norm automatically got adopted for computer monitors as well. The usual screen resolutions of 640 x 480, 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768 in early computer monitors represented the same aspect ratio of 4:3
.
I
f you are a guy like me who doesn't like wordy explanations, the following visual is for you.
As you can see, the screen sizes increase proportionately in a way that it still boils down to the same ratio of 4:3.
The story didn't end here and then HDTVs were introduced. The interestingly use an aspect ratio of 16:9 (also referred to as 16x9, 1.78:1 or wide-screen) which is wider than the standard display and are becoming popular day by day.
Here's another visual to compare it with the previous one.
Owing to the popularity of wide-screens, computer displays are also adopting the aspect ratio of 16:9 to have a more immersive movie watching experience on computer devices and laptops.
This changing trend in computer display sizes has a very important bearing on the software we use today which are mostly designed to follow a vertical work-flow. The following figure is drawn to scale and keeps the width constant for comparison purposes. This is just to show you what we loose when we move from a standard display to wide-screen one – vertical height.
The Legacy Design...
Lets first take a look at how things were like back in Ubuntu 10.10 so that you are better able to appreciate the difference.
This is how a Mozilla Firefox window looks like in 10.10. I have labeled different parts of windows and the top panel to help you identify the window components. Notice how much of the vertical space is eaten up just by the different components of the application leaving us with little room required for the actual work.
The New Design...
In Unity, Mark Shuttleworth took some radical design decisions to free up as much vertical space as possible. Thus Title bar and Menu Bar were integrated into one Unity Panel to rid the window of Bar Bloat and harvest some vertical space as you can see below.
Similarly, the Launcher was placed on the side of the screen instead of the bottom where it would have eaten up much of whats left of the precious vertical space.
Having seen things that way makes us understand that these design decisions were intentionally made keeping in view the mainstream adoption of wide-screens.
Suggestions...
Certainly some design improvements at application level can improve the situation.
For example, tabs in the Firefox occupy a whole bar. Given that the vertical space is precious, and we have more spare horizontal space at our disposal, the Firefox deign team can employ the side-tabs approach bringing all the tabs to the left side. But it has to be done well not just for the sake of doing it.
The design moves to save vertical space logically makes sense but they need critical attention to detail when implemented because even minor design flaws can worsen the UX (User eXperience). Lets see how different softwares adapt to this need of the time.
What do you think about this analysis and explaination?
منبع :
http://www.muktware.com/news/23/2011/1204
موضوع: علمی که در طراحی unity استفاده شده (دفعات بازدید: 1774 بار)
