GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 756408
new status/system menu is much too small / usability regression compared to 3.16
Last modified: 2019-09-16 13:19:09 UTC
The new user menu in 3.18 is a regression usability wise compared to 3.18 because it became much too small for no good reason. See https://people.debian.org/~biebl/GNOME-3.18/gnome-shell-3.18.png vs https://people.debian.org/~biebl/GNOME-3.18/gnome-shell-3.16.png Notice how the entries are elipsized without a chance to read what's there. I also think it's a bad idea that the text labels were dropped (VPN, Battery, Wi-Fi etc)
Thanks for taking the time to report this. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 708472 ***
Here's my 2 euro cents worth of thoughts on this: - translated strings are (in my limited experience) often longer then english version and will now have problems to fit. (The Mobile broadband item doesn't seem to even fit in the english version.) - not sure I agree that having the meaning of the icon spelled out is necessarily better (because these icons are IMHO pretty well recognized brands), but see next point(s).... - My impression is that gnome designs often use "bigger items are easier to click" guideline (fitts law?), which the new user menu design seems to contradict. - I fail to see the reason why you'd want to save space on the user menu, since if when I pop it up it's because I actually want to look at it (and wouldn't mind if it took up most of the screen) and nothing else. First thing I do before looking elsewhere is closing the user menu again (unless the actual I clicked made it automatically close ofcourse). The design of the user menu automatically closing seems to indicate to me that it's not something that you want to have open while focusing on some other area/window on the desktop. If someone could point me to where I could read up on the thoughts behind the 3.16->3.18 design changes that would be interesting to study.
While the overlong labels is the same as 708472, dropping valuable information like Bluethooth etc is the other aspect of this bug report. So I took the liberty to re-open it.
thats the problem with munging multiple issues in one report - now you've reopened it, but the title still talks about the issue from bug 708472
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 708472 ***