Improve "System Tools" Menu Usability

[ninavizz]

Child issue within #5677

Problem

There bulk of items in today's "System Tools" imposes a cognitive burden on users.

• Dropdown and flyout menus consisting of more than 3-5 items, are considered an anti-pattern in UX. There's exceptions to all rules like that... however, the reason, is because it is cognitively exhausting to look through a list of 39 items, ordered alphabetically.
• Apps that do a thing should be separated from settings, that specify how things should look or behave.
• Many of the Settings panes featured in the menu, are also invokable from the master "Settings" pane; so their presence in the long list, makes it harder to easily find other things that are not.
  • Locating things in the most intuitive place possible, is a preferred pattern over redundant paths to the same thing.
• Naming of things is not intuitive, and some utilities or settings existing outside contexts offered by another tool or utility, can be confusing (backups and audio, as examples).

Solution

Proposing the below:

• Per changes sought in the parent App Menu ticket, introduce grouping of things so that basic software stuff, hardware controls, and advanced things, can each be bucketed to facilitate quicker discovery by users.
  • Listing every single setting or tool available on the system, alphabetically, without a basic system of grouping, makes it painful to find things—almost always.
• Re-label some things (such as "Desktop Settings" instead of "Settings Manager") so item naming is more intuitive
• Consolidate some of today's existing, separate tools, such as backup things and the audio stuff, into a single open-able pane... that then has tabs within it (3 for audio, 2 for backups) that each house today's single-pane utilities.

[ninavizz]

Carrying over comments from Marek, in response to the proposed ideas above, from another issue the image was shared on.

As for the menu, I believe it's rather discussion for #5677. But generally I don't like hiding entries from settings, even if they are available elsewhere too. Settings app should be a place you can go and find your settings.

[marmarek]

Generally I agree in principle, the current "system tools" menu is hard to use. We have it slightly improved in the current R4.1 devel builds, by extracting qubes-specific tools to a separate menu, and keeping generic settings/tools in "system tools". May not be very intuitive for some users, but it's slightly easier to find things.

* Consolidate some of today's existing, separate tools, such as backup things and the audio stuff, into a single open-able pane... that then has tabs within it (3 for audio, 2 for backups) that each house today's single-pane utilities.

This specifically is hard to do technically for audio-related tools. We don't maintain those tools, and they are standalone applications, I'm not even sure if done in the same technology. What you propose is basically maintaining fourth application derived from those three.

[imme-emosol]

Well.. 'System Tools' also is just what I installed in dom0, in #5677#issuecomment-633380990 I suggest to get it out of the way by grouping it under an 'Other' item. This gives the option to create several specialized management GUI's, such as 'Qubes Management' & 'Interaction Management'.

The interaction management would contain: mouse & touchpad, keyboard, accessibility.

Display management would contain: display, window manager, window manager tweaks, screensaver.

Qubes management would contain: Backup & Restore, Global Settings, Manager, Templates, Updater.