Design Work in Progress: Spring 2009

From the current GNOME system preferences we have been dealing with,

A design effort at Sun led by Kristin Travis and Jenya Gestrin has been working to 'advance' the above preferences menus. We wanted to show how the current preferences menus could change to a more simpler and direct launcher.

This Flash prototype shows some of the variations we pursued along the way. The button on the bottom left 'New Look Demo' (with the BLUE background) is the latest version, showing:

• Categorizations of similar content together
• Menu items that lead to Tabs for the menu item's dialogs

The various iterations of launcher displays (for the launcher screen itself) that we explored are also provided:

• The Favorites we narrowed down

• An 'expanded' version of the Laucher (which might be accessed by clicking on the window's Maximize button).

• And all the Image Variations

We also looked at a slightly modified Control Center to demonstrate that look and feel with the categorization work done to date (see below)

Today's control center:

Some other options that experimented with reducing the current size of the Control Center:

We completed a very small Flash Prototype to get a sense of its operation: only Look and Feel: Appearance, and Hardware: Keyboard work.

Earlier Design Work (Winter 2008)

Determine short term re-designs for system preferences using usability data and large flow overviews of system preferences:

• System Administration menu and screens (PDF, 6.5MB)

• System Preferences menu and screens (PDF, 6.2MB)

• System Preferences menu and screens (cont'd) (PDF 4.7MB)

(Note: these PDFs load fine in Evince and Acrobat Reader, but not in Safari...)

Using the above work, create a document of current issues and recommendations to discuss with Sun Desktop and OpenSolaris teams, and subsequently with the GNOME community.

Usability Study (November 08)

Kristin and Jenya ran a system preferences usability study Nov. 21-25 2008 in Sun's Menlo Park usability labs. The primary goal of this study was to confirm the system preferences categories we have been considering for OpenSolaris. Ten participants:

• Completed some common system preferences tasks on both a PC and Mac
• Performed a card sorting task to categorize preferences content
• Reviewed some initial wireframes.

The Study report is available here.

Information Architecture (Summer 08)

• Information Architecture: categorizing and grouping settings (Jenya)
  • Latest Shell mockups -- not uploaded yet
  • Shell iterations (archive) -- not uploaded yet
  • Initial proposal -- not uploaded yet
• Visuals

  • Flash prototype with on-click behavior (click Removable Devices, then select Printers and Scanners)

  • Flash prototype with rollover behavior (test prototype for Sound, Removable Devices and Security sections)

  • Soraya's mockups (PP-D6.jpg, PP-D6b.jpg, PP-D6c.jpg, PP-D6d.jpg)

CategoryUsability