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Anaconda Usability Issues

These issues have been pulled together from various feedback the Anaconda team has received about the UI as well as multiple usability test sessions performed at DevConf 2013 in Brno and in the Red Hat engineering office in Westford, MA in March 2013.

A. General User Interface

  1. Too much empty space in screens (Wilck)
  2. Disproportion between large items and smaller elements at margins (Wilck)
  3. User dislikes having to move mouse from lower right corner to upper left corner, would like shortcuts to not have to move mouse so far (inode0)
  4. Not sure about whether or not the spokes in the hub had to be completed in a certain order or not - it's not clear. (tburke)
  5. It could be much clearer which items on screen are mandatory and which are optional - by default the VM window cut off the notification area so the only indicator was the /!\ icon which is really small. (tburke)
  6. Would like to see every screen to have a help screen available. Example - some checkbox items' real purpose wasn't clear, it would be nice to get more information about why you'd want to use that checkbox somehow. (tburke)
  7. We should have a '<' icon or a grid icon (see icon in gnome-control-center for going back to the hub) next to the 'Done' buttons in the upper left. We may even want to consider killing the 'Done' text and just having the button. (Mo)
  8. Once you've visited a screen, there's no indicator that it's been visited. (Mo)
  9. No keyboard layout indicator when switching layout (bug 901777) (bug 895913) (bugzilla) (vpodzime is working on this)
  10. Users used to buttons in lower right corner of screen, confused by position of 'done' button. (Wilck) All lower-right corner buttons removed from spokes. Only hubs have a button there now.
  11. We should display warning-level notices from the sanity check in the UI notification error; we only show errors now (bug 909410) (bugzilla) Done.

B. Language Selection

  1. Huge language selection list filling screen is overwhelming (Wilck)
  2. Initial language selection screen has no indication of keyboard layout affiliated with chosen language (Wilck)
  3. Easy to completely overlook 'Set keyboard to default layout' checkbox (Wilck)
  4. Text field at bottom of language selection screen confusing - has no label as to what it's there for (Wilck) (sbueno patched this - adding a label inside the filter box that says "Type here to search") Done, fix present in F19 RC builds

C. Date & Time Screen

  1. World map looks pixelated/blurry on larger screens (Wilck)
  2. Fine-tuning timezone using red pin inside the zone or top left controls easy to overlook (Wilck)
  3. City selection dropdown takes up full height of screen and is unwieldy to work with (Wilck)
  4. No way to configure AM/PM vs. 24 hour time preference if you use network time (inode0)
  5. Network time controls in far upper right affect grey-out status of local time settings on far bottom of screen - they are placed too far apart for user to realize they affect each other (inode0)
  6. It's unclear whether or not the date/time settings affect only the installer or if they will also affect the installed OS, and how (inode)
  7. If there's no network connection, don't set network time by default? (inode0)

D. Installation Destination Screen

  1. When advanced storage devices pane not visible, excessive whitespace on screen. (Wilck)
  2. "Done" would be more accurately called "Back" on this screen because if you select no storage 'done' doesn't make sense verbally. (Wilck)
  3. It's no longer possible set configure the 'BIOS boot [sic] disk order.' (Wilck)
  4. Suggestion that 'installation destination' screen design be changed to match that of the 'selected disks' lightbox (Wilck)
  5. Misunderstanding that the 'partitioning scheme' dropdown doesn't matter if you enter custom partitioning (when it actually does) (Wilck)
  6. Use case of 'I don't care about anything on the disk, just set up an install as if they disk was blank' is confusing when walking through the install destination & custom part UIs. (inode0)
  7. Once you've completed configuring storage, there's no real summary of how you set it up for you to review. It might be nice if there was.(adamw1) (clumens added a summary screen to custom partition exit)
  8. 'Encrypt my data' checkbox doesn't seem to belong on this screen. (Wilck) dlehman moved this checkbox to the disk selection summary dialog.
  9. Distinguishing between disks on this screen is difficult - only reliable property is disk size. Would like device names (eg /dev/sda/) or 'device 2 lun 3 on scsi host 1' to be more front and center. (Wilck) we added device names (e.g., /dev/sda) under the disks on this screen.
  10. 'Selected Disks' lightbox only offers serial number as additional information to identify disks, could offer more. (Wilck) (BZ #902617)
  11. Users worried about whether or not they are writing to disk when they exit storage spokes (Mo) Text added 'we won't touch your disks until you hit this button' on main hub and text 'disks left unselected here will be not be touched' text added to disk selection widgets on disk selection screen.

E. Custom Partitioning Screen

  1. Installations are sorted by their root partitions in alphabetical order rather than numberical order (e.g., sdb10, sdb11, ..., sdb9) (Wilck)
  2. Partitions used by several OSes are listed once for every distribution - no visual indication of which partitions are shared (Wilck)
  3. 'Not enough free space' error not very visible (bug 907889) (Wilck)
  4. It's unclear how you should overwrite a particular existing partition - user assumed they should delete the old one and create a new one. Instead, user discovered they should type '/' in the mount point field and click the 'reformat' box, which wasn't intuitive to them. (bug 908862) (Wilck)
  5. It seems impossible to configure custom partitioning with no leftover and unused space on disk. (inode0)
  6. Left-hand-side displays both pre-existing OSes as well as 'not yet existing' new OS install. (bug 883148) (bugzilla)
  7. The installer doesn't allow for encryption setup of individual LVs (bug 909228) (bugzilla)
  8. [major] RAID selection needs major revamping, has some inconsistencies / incorrect information. (dledford) RAID has been redesigned from scratch, implementation of redesign planned
  9. Custom partition creation instructions don't acknowledge partition re-use possibility. (bug 883150)(bugzilla)

F. Software Selection

  1. If a desktop environment's repo is busted, it'll still show up and wreak havoc and will break the whole install, this was a problem with mate in one of the test releases. Similarly there was an inkscape packaging bug in a test release that would cause the entire install to fail (minor points brought up peripherally related to bug 875433) (bugzilla)

G. Outright Bugs / Mistakes

  1. Exclamation Mark displayed when nothing to do on Software Selection entry on main hub (Wilck)
  2. 'Set keyboard to default layout' checkbox does not work / Language selection screen (Wilck)
  3. 'You have no working NTP server configured' warning message in notification area is not dismissed when NTP is turned off. (Wilck)
  4. Lightboxes shrink mysteriously (bug 907441) (Wilck)
  5. New LVs cannot be made larger even though there's available unused space in their VG (bug 906906) (bugzilla)
  6. New LVs default assigned size seems to be based on unpartitioned space on the physical disk rather than unused space within their VG. (bug 906908) (bugzilla)
  7. On network screen, lightbox that should say 'editing eth0' says 'Editing Boot Disk' (inode0) Appears to be a network manager bug?
  8. The 'set as boot device' and 'remove' buttons on the disk shopping cart screen should be greyed out when no disk is selected on install destination screen. (Wilck)

References

  • Wilck - PDF write-up sent to Larry T.
  • inode0 - email to Mo from John Rose with various UI feedback.
  • tburke - email to Mo from Tim Burke with various UI feedback (from FUDcon Lawrence demo)
  • dledford - email to Mo from Doug Ledford with feedback regarding RAID configuration
  • adamw1 - adamw email to anaconda-devel: https://www.redhat.com/archives/anaconda-devel-list/2013-January/msg00096.html
  • bugzilla - miscellaneous bugzilla-reported issues. Refer to bugzilla number in issue description for source.
  • mo - something Mo noticed in the UI that we should or forgot to do :)
  • Brno #1 - Brno usability tests session #1
  • Brno #2 - Brno usability tests session #2
  • Westford - Westford usability tests
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