Let's discuss what the experience of creating new Activities should look like
I was discussing in the VDG chat room what my first real attempt at using Activities felt like. Basically, after creating an Activity in System Settings nothing changed, and even after manually adding the Activity switcher on the panel (which I only did because I've been using Plasma for a long time and I know it exists), switching to a new Activity didn't look any different than switching Virtual Desktops. All my icons were the same, the panel and desktop layout were also the same, and even my panel shortcuts and Kickoff favorites were the same.
It's likely that a big contributor to why people don't understand Activities is the fact that nothing visible seems to happen when you enable them.
We came up with a few ideas to improve the situation.
Visual feedback:
- Creating a new Activity for the first time in System Settings could automatically add the switcher somewhere visible, like the panel or the desktop.
- @abetts also talked about visual effects to tell the user something new happened.
UX for new Activities:
We have two competing ideas for what the UX should be like for adding new Activities. Feel free to add more ideas in the comments.
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We could have two buttons in the Activities KCM/Activity switcher widget, a [Create New Activity] button that would create a blank Activity with the default desktop layout (if per-Activity layouts ever become a thing) and other default settings, like removing non-default desktop icons, reverting back to the default wallpaper and default panel/kickoff favorites, and a [] button that would copy an existing activity and keep all the same settings. Allowing the user to create a blank Activity would implicitly suggest that new activities can have their own set of settings without having to explain that explicitly. It would also be useful for quickly selecting if you want to create a new activity or copy an existing one from the Activity switcher widget.
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@zamundaaa also suggested a setup wizard that would always pop up after creating a new activity. The wizard could explain what Activities are and allow the user to select things like the name or what kinds of settings to copy (e.g. wallpaper, desktop icons, etc). This would give the user more granular control over activity settings.