In a recent post, I introduced the concept of a paper cut as “a bug that will improve user experience if fixed, is small enough for users to become habituated to it, and is trivial to fix.” Canonical’s nascent User Experience and Design team is determined to identify one hundred paper cuts to be fixed before Ubuntu 9.10 “Karmic Koala” is released in October. We have dubbed this exciting endeavor “One Hundred Papercuts.” From the project page on Launchpad:
[One Hundred Paper Cuts is] a project led by Canonical’s Design and User Experience team to improve user experience in Ubuntu by identifying 100 small points of pain for users, or “paper cuts”, and healing them!
You can see the paper cuts we’ve found to get a better idea of what a paper cut is, or to start fixing one of them today. Here are some of my favorites so far:
- Suggested output when printing a file to PDF is technical and generic “~/output.pdf”
- When you try to print using your PDF printer, the PDF created is named “output.pdf” by default and saved in your home folder. Even worse, sometimes it’s named “.ps” — good luck finding that file! Let’s give the file a sensible name and consider saving it to your desktop by default.
- Workspace switching via touchpad works badly
- Have you ever accidentally scrolled your mouse while your cursor was over your desktop, with desktop effects enabled? If not, make sure you’re sitting down when you try it. Let’s not make our beloved users nauseous.
- Width of notifications seem arbitrarily small
- notify-osd bubbles can display about three words before line wrapping occurs. Making these bubbles slightly wider will decrease strain on your eyes when reading them, and will allow you to read short messages more quickly.
- “Unmount” in volume right-click menu, is tech-speak and undiscoverable
- What’s the difference between “unmount” and “eject”? Why do I have to choose between them when all I want to do is get my CD out of the computer?
We need your help! Help find paper cuts on Launchpad by searching through existing bugs. If you find a bug that you believe to be a paper cut, here’s how you add it to the project. First, click the “Also affects project” link on the existing bug report:
Then add the project “hundredpapercuts” to the report:
You can report a new bug if your paper cut hasn’t already been reported, but please do your best to provide enough information for others to understand why the bug is a paper cut, what needs to be changed, and how it should be fixed.
If some small usability detail has been bothering you release after release, now is your chance to step up and get it the attention it deserves. If you’ve never contributed to Ubuntu, or even Free software, this is a great opportunity to get involved and make a big difference — take ownership of a paper cut by discovering and documenting a great solution, or roll up your sleeves, check out some code, and try to fix a paper cut on your own. If we can find and heal one hundred paper cuts, Ubuntu 9.10 will surely be the most usable release of Ubuntu yet. Let’s get to work!
Edit: Feature requests are not paper cuts. Also, please think twice about reporting a paper cut if it only affects a very small number of users; we’ve only allocated resources for 100 paper cuts this cycle, so we want to choose them carefully to maximize user benefit.
Edit #2: For this first cycle of 100 paper cuts, fixing a paper cut should improve the usability of the default Ubuntu experience. In other words, a bug that does not affect a default installation of Karmic does not qualify as a paper cut at this point in time.
25 comments
That’s a good catch. Those are truly annoying bugs, especially printing to file. I always change the name, save to desktop and save it as PDF. Fixing that bug would save 10-15 clicks per day for me.
And yeah, scrolling for workspaces switch was a bad idea.
Good to have you guys!
Thank you for posting about this. The more and more I hear about the One Hundred Paper Cuts project, the more I like it.
Good work guys, and good luck!
It’s frustrating that some of these papercuts have been around for so long with no love. Glad someone is on the case now!
You might want to take a browse through brainstorms usability section as they often have such papercuts, and if you’re extra lucky they’re linked to a bug
Well, I filed a bug with the partitioner, can you check it to see if this fits the description of a papercut?
Thanks!
Are Kubuntu papercuts welcome for this project?
Bugsbane, hopefully the paper cuts project will reappear each cycle if it is successful, and we may change our strategy later on, but I believe we are focusing on Ubuntu for the first 100 paper cuts
I am glad someone finally noticed the problem with PDF printing dialog.
Thanks in advance for working on this.
this minor bug is more than 3 years old. and still awaiting for the developers to get freed and fix it :(
https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/40872
and there are hundreds of such minor bugs.
i can safely assume your 100 papercuts might take a century!!!!
> Suggested output when printing a file to PDF
And remember that “printing to PDF” is a technicality of the implementation, users really want to “save a document to PDF format”.
There is more of that papercut stuff here:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LittleDetails
Lots of them don’t have bugs filed yet.
Feel free to add them.
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/LittleDetails – it has a really good list indeed!
I believe the notify-osd “papercut,” has been solved. How do we remove this?
“Then add the project “hundredpapercuts” to the report:” <- that can’t be done in 2 bugs:
#344759 – “While on fullscreen desktop wallpaper is shown on tooltip events.”
#138654 – “Annoying and useless delays on password entry errors”
Oh, please please please please bugs like this one: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/langpack-locales/+bug/208548
They get closed as WONTFIX, but really is a huge papercut.
Short summary: the day of week in calendar is decided by the *language* you have chosen which has nothing to do with it and there is no (easy) way to change it. In many many countries it’s more common to use English than the native language, for various reasons – but then calendaring uses the wrong day to start the week, which may sound like a small thing but actually is a repeated paper cut because it jolts the mental model.
Some way to simply change start of week (like EVERY other OS and/or calendar using app has) would be wonderful. Some way that isn’t LC_SOMETHING in some text file…
Great project!
You are the Savlon to our wounds… TY!
FIX IT: https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts/+bug/22007
http://www.hulu.com/watch/38477/saturday-night-live-update-thursday-fix-it
FIX IT FIX IT
I don’t want to hear any excuses about upstream. If Ubuntu sucks only by virtue of Gnome sucking, then Ubuntu still sucks. No one is forcing Ubuntu to use every shitty Gnome package just as Gnome ships it.
Yes, this is a papercut… and a bleeding gash as well.
WiFi drivers are being incorrectly loaded. If you switch the order they are loaded, you get WiFi, if not, you don’t.
I have to run this every time to get internet on my laptop. sudo rmmod b44; sudo modprobe -r b43 ssb ndiswrapper wl; sudo modprobe wl; sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart
I guess it’s worth mentioning that I have a BCM4328 controller, and it affects most BCM43XX controllers.
If my workaround above is any indication, this is probably one of the easiest bugs to fix :) Just switch the order on the BCM43XX series!
It’s not bug, but it does affect many new users and is simple (code-wise) to fix…. but I’m not sure you want to enter its politics. I’ll throw it here anyway; Option/preferences shouldn’t be in EDIT menu, it should be in TOOLS. I know GNOME guidlines etc, but at least for some future chance……
Please don’t report bugs here, this is not the Ubuntu bug tracker :)
What about users who are using Kubuntu? This effort seem like a gnome-centric one (and I do not have any complaints that Canonical is focusing on Gnome), but yet I wish there was a way for recent KDE4 converts.
I filed a bug that irritates me, but am unable to assign it to hundredpapercuts.
See
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/387957
If I click “Also affects project” I can only enter URLs of bugtrackers etc.
Please could you clarify how this is supposed to be done?
gdi2k, click “Choose another project”
https://bugs.launchpad.net/gnome-panel/+bug/389407
“Make vertical gnome-panel usable” was even marked as a papercut before I got to it — but somebody has marked its status “Invalid”.
On Netbooks, there’s a lot more horizontal space than vertical space. I moved my Panels to the left edge as soon as I noticed how little space I had for reading in my web browser. Only about half the stuff in them worked. Come on, guys! This is one Property setting’s difference from the default screen (two clicks away).
Please resolve all the problems with laptop microphones and sound! Where do we live if 90% of all laptops can’t use their built in microphone!
This is annoying and could be a reason for me to change OS.
Thanks
easybeat
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