bb's blog
On Usability and User Experience of Free Software
Help to find better metaphors
A big problem of KDE Activities is their name. It builds up a poor mental model and thus makes life hard for users. With this post we ask you to help us finding a better name for the underlying concepts.
When I talk to people about our quest to make KDE Activities work, one of the things I hear most often is: “I never really understood what they are!”. There are several reasons for that, a very obvious one is: They are buggy (e.g. concerning non KDE apps).
But by now I think an even bigger problem lies in an unfortunate choice of metaphors. Both, “Activities” and “Virtual Desktops” are actually not well suited on their own – and a mess, when combined together. [Continue reading…]