On Tue 19 Mar 2013 07:28:27 AM EDT, Allan Day wrote:
A bit of background:
The change during the 3.8 cycle was based on a couple of factors. First, the logo interfered with the layout of the login screen: it's a prominent visual presence that creates another anchor point which conflicts with the other elements on the screen (ie. it is horizontally centered, which clashes with the anchor points in the user list). Second, the logo was felt to be a distracting presence. We've made an effort to make sure that the most important elements are the most visually prominent, and we want the primary interaction points to be the ones that jump out at you. The logo was a strong visual presence placed above the user list: this drew the eye to it, making it the first thing you saw, and distracted you from the parts of the screen that are actually useful to the user (ie. the user list). Third and finally, having the logo in its previous position limited the size to which the user list could grow when there are a large number of users.
My preference is to focus the user interface on providing the best user experience possible. That means prioritising the things that people need to use, reducing distraction and making the UI look great. The addition of a logo diminishes the user experience along each of these dimensions.
The proposal to replace the logo with a simple string in the top-left hand corner is intended to mitigate the negative impact of including a logo while retaining a visual reference to the distributor. However, the usability issue that Ryan brought up is a valid concern about this proposal.
It has been suggested that not including the logo somehow weakens distributions' ability to brand their products. My view is that this is not the case. Branding is not the practice of slapping logos onto products. Instead, it is the attempt to instill and promote positive associations with the brand. The best way to do that, in my opinion, is to make the user experience as good as it can possibly be. If you diminish the user experience through the addition of a logo, then you actually harm the brand: you make the product worse, and in the process you make it less likely that people will think good things about your brand.
I suppose we are at a complete impasse then; to me it is completely unacceptable to completely debrand the operating system. You do realize there are usability implications with that - namely, people don't even know what they are running in order to obtain help with it or even identify the type of system they are using.
You have basically posed here that there is no way you will accept a logo on the login screen. How is a compromise possible then?
~m