Glaringly obvious usability omissions
SuSE actually has a usability dpt, and yet some obvious things are slipped through and never get fixed. Check this SuSE 10.3 screenshot and look at its “start” menu. The headers “Favorite applications and “Recent applications” are not bold and they have no soft background color behind them, making it extremely difficult for the eye and brain to figure out what is what quickly enough. The brain has to spend extra calories to work on that menu. That portion of the screen just looks a mashup of text rather than distinguishable items.
Same goes for the Gnome Control Center which I filed a bug report about it a year ago, and it hasn’t been fixed either. And we are talking about a 2 minute fix that would really help out usability. A fix that it’s so glaring obvious to me…
Update: Here’s my take on SuSE’s start menu. To me, this looks much easier to digest and sort out in my brain. Update 2: Mockup updated.