Make Sailfish UI consistent and easy again. Please!

It's a sad thing: users were crying out for new features, most or all of which are available on other OSes, and what got delivered was reshuffled screen decorations, which best I can tell was at the top of nobody's wish list. I hope Jolla is listening; they don't seem to have been.

They are listening, but sadly the community is not the first priority.

In which case: if what was just released is the answer, what was the question?

Indeed. The listed changes remind me of requirements of corporate customers. Typical claims and requirements are:

1. Users don’t understand new UI concepts. The UI should be adopted to that, what people know.
2. Add a text, tooltip, description, button here and there.

The impact is complexity, breach of consistence and prevented innovation. This is, what I learned in many year of product management and solution business.

In which case: if what was just released is the answer, what was the question?

:

Sailfish OS has matured to its third generation, Sailfish 3, which now fully packetizes the offering for multitude of corporate solutions. In line with the regional licensing strategy, Sailfish 3 has a deeper level of security making it a solid option for various corporate and organizational solutions, and other use cases. New enhanced features include e.g. Mobile Device Management (MDM), fully integrated VPN solutions, enterprise WiFi, data encryption, and better and faster performance. For daily users Sailfish 3 brings essentially better performance, deepened security, and smoother user experience.

With Sailfish 3 we are also better equipped to offer full support for regional infrastructures including steady releases & OS upgrades, local hosting, training, and a flexible feature set to support specific customer needs.

https://blog.jolla.com/sailfish3/

But the point of OP was/is that copying/immitating other OS's is not the way to go and mixed UI elements (gestures vs buttons) lead to inconsistent UI and therefor will make it harder for people to understand. The gesture based navigation has a lot of advantages and is/Was something unique to SFOS. It's sad that Jolla seems to abandon these ideas (e.g. buttons on app covers instead of gestures from SFOS1 to SFOS2, now a more android/iOS like Design of the top menu).

SFOS3 with the 3-part-top-gesture feels great. Before, one (me) always had to watch out to not accidently close an app.

@MartinK You mention the learning curve - and this is what consistency is all about. It must not be necessary to re-learn a UI for each application separately. Let's just stick with the one example that you picked, the gallery. And let's just focus on one point: Consistency.

When you get you first SailfishOS device, you learn how things work: If there's a list of items and you open one of the items, the following screen will show the full content. A swipe to the right will bring you back to the list. A visual indicator on the top left reminds you of this swipe. Depending on the context, additional commands are available via a pulley menu. Additional details about the object you're viewing are available when you swipe to the left one level deeper. Once you got that, it works everywhere: notes, contacts, messages, documents, store... You don't need to learn a new UI concept for each and every app.

Now, with the new image view, there are new app-specific UI concepts that users have to learn. New users as well as experienced users. First: While everywhere else a content view is closed by swiping to the right, in this one particular case it's closed by swiping down. Also, there is no visual indicator at all that this is even possible. (So: Not "discoverable".) Second: Instead of the pulley menus you use in other apps, you now use icons.

Now you might argue that for some esoteric reason, viewing a pic is something completely different than viewing any other content and really requires a different UI. (Which would raise the question why it didn't require a different UI before.) Even then you have yet another inconsistency:

Apart from the gallery, the use case "open one of many pictures, maybe manipulate them" is also covered in the messenger app. Interestingly, yet another variation of the content view appears there: swipe right to close (Sailfish style), but icons instead of pulley menu.

So we have 3 (!) UIs for the user to learn. /me unhappy.

Viewing pictures did require a different UI before, it just didn't exist yet and the one we used to have was a nightmare to use. Feel free to criticise the new UI, but please don't make it seem like the previous one had any good aspects to it.

@ossi1967 Actually, I think the gallery and top menu redesign is an indication that other screens and applications will be redesigned in a similar (maybe a bit boring and not very original, but discoverable and easy to use) manner. Once that is done it will be consistent again. :)

Also some personal remarks about Sailfish OS UI principles:

• for new users the pull down menus are not very discoverable and the don't notice they are there
• list view + long list + pull down/up menu -> disaster, you have to scroll to top/bottom (loosing your position in the listview) to activate the menu, for this reason all list views in my applications have headers that can be used to access the menu at any time
• the swipe from the left/right pages are almost undiscoverable and even Jolla developers mentioned they are very dissatisfied about how they used them in the email client
• dialogs suck, often it is not even apparent one is looking at a dialog that needs to be accepted & how (for that reason there are no Sailfish OS style dialogs in my apps, just simple screens that ask you to press a yes or no button)
• remorse timers are almost always a bad idea, they delay the user by 5 seconds at arbitrary time and one can be never sure what happens if he leaves a screen with a remorse timer running or quits an application when a remorse timer is running, a simple "are you sure" dialog/popup would be much preferable
• the long-press-to-get-additional-options also feels more like a last minute cludge than an elegant UI concept and while at least used relatively consistently, it's not discoverable (which things will show more stuff when I long press them and which will not ?)

why does previous/next picture has to be horizontal? vertical would do just fine if a proper indicator is in place for new users. And if there are exceptions they should be consitent throughout the app. Not one page this next page that.

I have formatted has in italic as it is a highly subjective area. For me, previous and next work better with left and right (compared to up down). This is the same as in the calender btw.

but in calender its the main-window so u don't expect it to go back to the upper hierarchy level. Espescially since that is the way the upper levels are designed.

Best way to get consistency into SFOS would be to only use edge-gestures since they don't interfere with the apps content. If you split the other edges similar to the top with the new menu and closing 2 more functions are possible.

@pisarz1958 I think there's a misunderstanding on two levels:

Can't we just all agree that it's better to have actual useful buttons available where that (nice looking but pointless) ambience switcher was?

The discussion is not about "the buttons" (=the new top menu) vs. the ambience switcher, it's about the new top menu vs. the old "close app" swipe. I know there used to be a ambience switcher somewhere, but I never used it so I don't know where it was. What I used a lot - and much more than any of the functionality the top menu has - is the close app gesture. That was easy and there was no way to get it wrong. Now you have to aim very cerafully at the edge of the display and then try to pull down, making sure you don't accidentally activate the menu.

The second misunderstanding is that it's about

the hate about top menu

It's not so much the top menu as such - even though I admit in my opinion it's no good. It's about complicating what used to be "one action, activated by swipe down" to "2 actions, activated by swipe down either on the left edge or on the right edge or in the middle - but be prepared for wrong results, we don't tell you how wide the respective areas are".

No matter what you think about the new top menu as such, you have to admit that the concept of 3 swipe areas for 2 actions is more complicated than 1 swipe area for one action.

Yes, I agree with ossi1967. I don't have problem with top menu itself but with the fact that Jolla broke heavily used (at least for me) top swipe to implement it.
BTW I caught myself yesterday to go left swipe and pull to switch on the wifi connection... It would make much more sense to me to access this menu with left swipe.

Right. Yeah, it's garbage, I totally agree.

I for one think it's not very difficult to adapt to (I mean its the corner how can you miss that?) and since edge swipes don't interfere with app-content I found the split rather nice to get more useful gestures to the system. I would actually split every side comparably and make going back a edge swipe frome the side corners and (pulley)menu from the bottom corners.