:Ibex Design: User Switching, Presence and Session Termination
Ibex Design: User Switching, Presence and Session Termination Nov 2, 2008, 22 :02 UTC (0 Talkback[s]) (4625 reads) (Other stories by Mark Shuttleworth)
"We decided to use the top-right location, because it's one of the key places in the screen that's quick and easy to get to (you can throw your mouse into a corner of the screen very easily and accurately) and because there was a strong precedent in the old Ubuntu logout button.
"One key insight was that we wanted to make "switching user" less an exercise in guesswork and more direct - we wanted to let people switch directly to the specific user they were interested in rather than have an intermediate step where they login as that other user. So we started with the Fast User Switcher applet, or FUSA, as a base fr the design. Another key idea that emerged was that we wanted to integrate the "presence setting" into the same menu, because "going offline" or "I'm busy" are similar state-of-mind-and-work decisions to "log me off the system" or "shut down"."
