taskbar: onlyGroupWhenFull

[Michael Rudolph]

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 22:13, Zack Rusin <zack at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thursday 30 October 2008 16:19:32 Orcan Ogetbil wrote:
>> Doing a quick google search: group tasks annoying
>> brought me to a discussions page about Windows XP
>
> Well, all your googling proves is that Microsoft along with Apple and KDE all
> groups tasks by default, which is pretty much the opposite what you're arguing
> for.
> Fortunately for us we have usability experts and instead of complaining about
> things you don't like you can go and ask them.
> Celeste what's your opinion on task grouping?
>

Hi Zack,

while I agree that it is interesting to hear Celeste, or others with a
leaning towards usability, because it offers an important, and often
neglected, view on software design, I think the issue at hand is
actually more fundamental than usability.

Conceptually a taskbar competes with UI elements like virtual desktops
or the new idea of activities, they all offer means to navigate
between different working contexts. The problem with taskbars is, that
they were conceived in a time, when a user's working context could
easily be represented in a single window. Computers were so limited,
that only a handful of tasks could be performed with them and for each
of these tasks there was an application (in one window). Thus, in the
user interface, a window and a task were the same thing. As computers
became more powerful and capable of many more tasks, it was
uneconomical to still represent every combination of sub tasks in a
separate window. Thus came modularization, which is a good thing. But
it breaks the equivalence in the user interface of a window and a
task.

One remedy are virtual desktops, where a user's working context is
just displayed as a complete desktop with any number of windows and
the ability to switch contexts by switching from one desktop to
another. Another is to allow grouping of windows, which does not
really work. All windows from one application do rarely correspond to
one working context, which leaves us with manual grouping. This would
allow a user to group all windows into one working context, but it
also seems kind of awkward in the 21st century.

I think, the solution would be to agree on some fundamental concepts
of how a user's desktop (and his mobile phone, his entertainment
system, car, ...) work and then tackle the problems in front of us,
because caring for the usability of taskbar grouping today is like
trying to make it convenient to choose a caliber: to shoot yourself in
the foot.

Just my two cents.

michael

>> I admit that I didn't talked to sufficiently many people about this to
>> achieve a reliable statistical data but I can say that every single person
>> I asked disables this feature as soon as he installs his new DE.
>
> This is how my panel looks without grouping:
> http://ktown.kde.org/~zrusin/panel.png
> and this is only showing tasks from the current desktop. I have to click on
> each and every item in the taskbar to find anything. While I'm certainly a very
> special kind of user, your argument for pointlessness of grouping tasks is
> obviously bogus.
>
> z
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