Kickoff's Applications page suffers from a few usability-related deficiencies:
- Click-based navigation makes it very slow and annoying to find an app by category: click category, click back, click on another category, click back again, ad nauseam
- No ability to see all apps; limited to Category-based view only
- Poor use of space; most of the view at any given time is whitespace. Feels wasteful
I'd like to propose that we overhaul this page for greater usability and an improved overall user experience. Here are two exceptionally crude mockups illustrating generally what I'm envisioning, followed by a textual explanation:
- The page can switch between category-based navigation and a flat alphabetical list (and remember the last-used view mode)
- For the Categories view, adopt the hover-based category browser used in Application Dashboard and SimpleMenu, which is really pleasant, easy to use, and fast for experts. It's also the same UI that's used by many other popular Linux launcher menus, such as XFCE's Whisker Menu and Linux Mint's mintmenu.
- Use square icon tiles instead of horizontal list entries. This increases visual density and allows the display of many more apps at once. It also does a better job of highlighting pretty app icons!
- Badge recently-installed apps, per T7913: Make it really obvious where newly-installed apps can be found