GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 593907
Log in screen is confusing, not clear what to do
Last modified: 2010-06-17 03:10:39 UTC
The bug has been opened on https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/410337 "In the new log in screen in karmic, you are presented with the existing users on the system. The first one is selected by default, making it very hard to realize you have to actually click them. The default case is that your user is selected, making this issue critical UI-wise. I've done random testing of this 3 users who use Ubuntu, and none of them could tell me what they needed to do until I let them click around."
The issue is mainly that the default screen lists users and suspend, hibernate button but has no obvious button to click to validate the selected user
Bug 596151 is a proposal to move the shutdown buttons to a menu
bug 596151 landed now. I guess we need to add a string "Please select a user to log in" or something.
I am glad this bug is fixed. I would occasionally hit the "Restart" button when I wanted to restart the login process, not restart the system, and get frustrated. While it's sort of funny that I would get confused about this, even though I had made the mistake in the past, it is better to avoid this sort of confusion. In the old GDM we replaced the "Cancel" wording with "Start Again" since usability people suggested that "Cancel" is confusing since you aren't really canceling anything when you just want to do something like start over since you realize that you mistyped your username or clicked on the wrong user. Note bug #482642. I'll re-open that bug for consideration since we changed back to the original wording that prompted that bug report.
Oops, but #482642 is an unrelated bug. Got confused by the ChangeLog. Acutally, there is no bug report about that naming change. Looking back, I see the reasoning was as follows: The GNOME usability people (I believe Calum) said "Cancel" would make people think that they were canceling the login operation (as if clicking it might allow you to login without authentication). Then we changed it to "Start Over", but then some British people told us that "Start Over" is poor English wording. So we changed it to "Start Again".
We should probably handle the button text as a separate bug report. Making "Start Again" (again) seems fine. Another idea would be to make it "Switch User" so it mimics the Lock screen dialog (which is also a dialog asking for a password, and the "Switch User" button there does something very similar to what the "Cancel" button does here.
Yes, that seems a good idea. I like "Switch User". I filed bug 600182 to track this. Thanks.
Going to close this as it has a few issues in it and some have been fixed.