The Effect of the Placement of UI Elements on User Experience – Case GNOME 40
Juhaninmäki, Erkka (2022)
2022
Tietotekniikan DI-ohjelma - Master's Programme in Information Technology
Informaatioteknologian ja viestinnän tiedekunta - Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences
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Hyväksymispäivämäärä
2022-12-01
Julkaisun pysyvä osoite on
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202211278658
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:tuni-202211278658
Tiivistelmä
The placement of the user interface elements naturally has an effect on the user experience. The goal of this study is to find out if moving the panel of the GNOME Shell UI from the top to the bottom of the screen would help users primarily using mouse for interaction. The study was motivated by a change in the GNOME Shell UI layout introduced by GNOME 40 that increased the distance between crucial elements of the UI and thus the amount of mouse travel required for certain basic tasks. This caused some concern in the community, both among the users and contributors of GNOME.
Two prototypes, representing the layout of GNOME Shell 40 and an alternative layout pro-posed by a GNOME design team member, were produced. These prototypes were evaluated by test users in an unmoderated, remote sessions. After testing both prototypes, the users were asked to state which layout they preferred and for what reasons.
22 of the 33 participants that completed the tasks preferred the proposed alternative layout which required less mouse travel. 8 of those explicitly mentioned mouse usability as a reason for their preference. Overall, the most common reason for the participants’ preferences ap-peared to be familiarity of a given layout.
These findings give reasons to cautiously recommend the GNOME project to switch to a layout with the panel at the bottom. However, because of certain limitations of this study, a primary recommendation is to conduct some further research to confirm these findings.
Two prototypes, representing the layout of GNOME Shell 40 and an alternative layout pro-posed by a GNOME design team member, were produced. These prototypes were evaluated by test users in an unmoderated, remote sessions. After testing both prototypes, the users were asked to state which layout they preferred and for what reasons.
22 of the 33 participants that completed the tasks preferred the proposed alternative layout which required less mouse travel. 8 of those explicitly mentioned mouse usability as a reason for their preference. Overall, the most common reason for the participants’ preferences ap-peared to be familiarity of a given layout.
These findings give reasons to cautiously recommend the GNOME project to switch to a layout with the panel at the bottom. However, because of certain limitations of this study, a primary recommendation is to conduct some further research to confirm these findings.