Android alpha -832 with experimental mobile components change

[Dirk Hohndel]

> On Feb 12, 2016, at 7:19 AM, Thomas Pfeiffer <thomas.pfeiffer at kde.org> wrote:
>> My current thinking is that having the additional items in the top bar
>> doesn't really cause any harm. They don't waste screen real estate (since
>> we aren't going to drop the top bar completely - ok, maybe we could make
>> it thinner, but that's not a huge difference), they are easy and obvious
>> to even a casual user.
> 
> I would definitely advise against having controls for opening the drawers both 
> at the top _and_ at the bottom. That appears not only redundant, but actually 
> confusing because you have two controls that do exactly the same, yet look and 
> feel different. This will make users ask themselves whether the drawers opened 
> from the top or bottom control maybe only look the same at first, but are 
> actually different.

> So I'd say that the duplicated controls actually do cause "harm".
> 
> This is a point where you have to decide:

Interesting. I hadn't thought of it that way.
But that causes this question to become MUCH harder.
It's the ultimate fallacy in software development. It's always easier to say "yes"
to a new feature, to say "we support both" when there are two ways to do things,
to "add another preference/option" so each group of users gets what they ask
for. 

But you are of course right, you create a much stronger user experience by 
saying "we do THIS and not THAT"... 

Thanks, Thomas, for giving good advise and increasing the level of discomfort 
and pain for this maintainer.

> Either you aim for full consistency 
> with Material Design apps even if it's an ergonomic disadvantage, then you 
> should ditch the handles at the bottom and use only the buttons in the top bar 
> (plus dragging the action button if there is one). 

Well, if we go for full consistency then there is no Action Button, either - almost
no Material Design applications have that concept.

> Or you take the bold step to diverge from the norm for something better 
> adapted to the larger phones we have these days and drop the buttons in the 
> header.
> There are definitely good arguments for both positions, but you have to make a 
> decision.

I've played with the new transparent arrows (actually, for us it's now just one
arrow as we don't have a context menu anywhere). And I must say I really like
them. I'd go a tiny bit more transparent (maybe 0.4 instead of 0.5). But that's
bike-shedding.

I've been working this morning to make another experimental binary that switches
us all the way back to "Plasma Mobile" style. Remove the menus in the top bar. 
Make the top bar thinner to make more space available and move the actions 
that we had in the top bar into a context menu.

Ironically, that's actually the version that gives us the MOST screen real estate.
Because the areas under the Action Button and the two handles is usable (you
can see what's there) and a smaller top bar will give more space overall.

And then we can see how the "I want my hamburger menu" camp of our users
responds.

> Heaving a page title at the top makes sense, as long as there are no controls 
> in that hard-to-reach area.

I think this is where we hear the difference in perception. Some of our users
(I tried to bounce the emails that weren't copied to you) don't see it this way
at all. My guess is that they have 4" phones. We actually had one user point
out that to him the lower corners appear harder to reach than the upper
corners.

> The thing is: Whatever you do in user interface / interaction design, you will 
> never make _everybody_ absolutely happy. It's not possible. What you should 
> aim for is a design that makes significantly more people happy than unhappy. 
> That's the best you can do, at least for an application that people use by 
> choice.
> If you're designing something that everybody _has_ to use without alternative, 
> things are different, but that's really a rare case.

Yes! We are going to make Subsurface mandatory.

YU VILL LIKE IIT (spoken with Arnold-style German accent)

> If you design to avoid making anybody unhappy, you may be able to reach that 
> goal, but at the cost of not making anybody actually happy, either.

See above. Thanks, Thomas :-)

>> The question is more complicated with the handles on the bottom - and
>> that's why we are doing these alpha binaries so people can try them and
>> tell us what they think. I'll make a new binary with the transparent
>> handles soon so we can collect more feedback.
> 
> Yes, the idea with the bottom corner handles still has to stand the test of 
> actual usage, and I'm excited to see what the results will be!

I'll try to find the time to make that even more polarizing test binary that I mentioned 
above. I got it mostly done before breakfast but then got side tracked by getting my
daughters to school and focusing on the day job. Still need to track down one odd 
bug before pushing it.

/D