Text under icons in activity bar

[sana-ajani]

People who are new to VS Code could benefit if we put names under the extension icons in the activity bar. In user studies with students, they tended to click on text over icons when first exploring the editor. Could we use the default extension name as the text? Something like this:

[isidorn]

I agree this would help new users but it looks ugly imho
Also brings too much details, and nowhere else in vscode we have this pattern of icons + text.
New users would just have to figure to use hover for discovery

Also I like helping new users but I do not think we should sacrifice the existing experience.
So an improved Welcome page is the way to go imho
And on top of the welcome page we can add some overlay which would point to what is what in vscode

[miguelsolorio]

I think this only works well when you have single word for each view, like Teams:

Unfortunately for us we have a lot of views with long words and extension names can be even longer (like GitHub Pull Requests and Issues). @isidorn has a point that we don't have this pattern in our other actions that are icon only. I do think having a revamped "User Interface Overview" will help new people discover how to use the tool better.

[sana-ajani]

Thanks for the feedback! From UX discussion, we can potentially consider adding explicit call outs to the activity bar icons in the Interface Overview or consider having custom tooltips (like in Slack) that also has the keyboard shortcut

[isidorn]

So ideas for explicit call outs:

• When user preses alt to navigat the main menu and see the main menu shortcuts that we show the names here
• When the user has the Welcome view open (he might be new and exploring)

But IMHO the custom tooltip which appears faster would be the best solution.

[miguelsolorio]

Going to move this to #115641 since we have that as the exploration for adding labels: