I cannot explain how much I do not want to see this green dot and “New!” text in my application launcher.
Rather than be a passionate contributor like you, I have regrettably become a slave to the Big Tech industry - But one thing I can provide is insight into why operating systems like iOS and Windows have this noise:
Impact driven development
People need to justify their work on a continuous basis, with the upside of promotions and downside of layoffs. They add the most useless features with the most subtle anti-patterns to drive clicks they use as metrics for performance evaluations. Despite whatever they announce in their blog, that’s why these things exist.
I do not know why this “New!” green button was created, but please do not follow these patterns. Go slow. Take your time. If someone did a UX study that showed people were installing apps and then they couldn’t find it… I have many questions.
Here is a €100.00 EUR donation to KDE. I will donate another €100.00 EUR if you remove this. Please do not follow the other “User” Interface designs.
By the way, this is not meant to be a knock on the contributor or quality of the feature itself. I’m sure that person is an amazing dev, but please don’t take inspiration from whatever Big Tech is doing.
I don’t understand why this get so much hate. What “patterns” you are talking about? How is this feature in any way related to “performance evaluation” is completely beyond me and seems devoid of any logic.
I always just search the app I need so I personally don’t need to use it. But just because I don’t need it doesn’t mean it is useless.
It is very simple design to point the user in which directory the newly installed app is. Cause they simply might not be able to know which directory it exists… Simple as that. How is this in any way related to the so-called “impact driven development” is just something I can’t comprehend.
I don’t think dginovker’s assumption is all that outlandish. After all big tech development does indeed sacrifice UX if it leads to better metrics e.g. more money. This feature is indeed inspired by what other players in the industry do.
However, I know that Kai, who added this feature, is not one to blindly follow what big tech does. When he implements something, it is because he actually thinks it is neat. So in this case there really is no reason to worry that KDE would copy bad changes out of foolishness.
I get what you are saying and agree with the principle, but here is a reasonable use case for this feature. This is based on my actual experience where this would have been useful.
User becomes interested in having an application that does some kind of thing. They do some research to find some candidates and install several apps for this kind of thing to see if any if them serve their needs. Some of them have unintuitive names that they have trouble remembering. They may want to try out various of these apps over the next several days or weeks whenever a use for them arises, and may have trouble remember what they are all called. It is handy to be able to essentially query your system with “What junk did I install recently?”
ahmm… that’s a bit of an over-reaction. But I’m with you, this was not needed. If I install an app, I certainly know its name. Basic organic intelligence, right?
Since it can be disabled, I don’t care.
I am seasoned enough to know where stuff goes when I install it, but as a new user I would’ve loved this feature. I was so confused back then when I installed things and could not find them on the menus.
As we are receiving quite a few new users lately, this feature will certainly come in handy for many of them.
That little green dot is not essential. But it’s handy, especially if the installed app doesn’t fit exactly into any category. So it has usability benefits. Even if not everyone needs it. People need different things. I imagine it disappears after a while anyway. At worst its just a green dot.
The best thing about this feature is when your distro adds a new app to a metapackage, so you magically have a new app installed that you didn’t know about… but now you do.
I also like it when I install a new app but don’t know what menu it’s going to land in. LACT is in System? Graphics? Games? Utilities? Oh it’s in the one with the dot on it, and that’s System. Nice.
True story: When I wrote the above examples just now, I went into my menu, to actually find out which menu has LACT in it, so the example would make sense. Y’know what I saw? A green dot and ‘New’ badge on nvtop which I had completely forgotten I installed late last night
I mean I couldn’t have scripted that one better
It’s a signal, here.
I understand where you’re coming from, it’s super common to see that kind of gross behaviour become normalized and drawn into everyday computing. Google make a business of it, look at material where the entire premise is ‘copy our phone UX, people are addicted to it’. But that isn’t what happened here, this is a thing users requested. I was one of them.
There’s a matching feature in System Settings btw, which is also awesome and has a switch to turn it off.
Sounds like Tuesday
This applies to UX design far less often than one might organically intuit. UX design is basically 90% “holy moly they use it like that?! I mean I guess it makes sense now that I know of it but I’d never have thought of that”
