Some category lists are too long

I've now finalized the subcategories for 2.0. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SoftwareCenter?action=diff&rev2=349&rev1=348> Ironically enough, "Sound & Video" is one department I don't think we can split at the moment, because there's such a crossover between music players and movie players.

For 2.0, Michael has applied subsections to the “Games” and “Developer Tools” departments, and I’ve applied subsections to the “Graphics”, “Internet”, and “Science & Engineering” departments.

These alleviate the problem (so I’m downgrading it to Medium), but with three provisos. First, we’re using a two-pane department screen, so the full long list is still there by default when you navigate into a department. (For version 3, we’ll probably replace the second pane with an “All” button/link in the first pane.) Second, some departments — including Sound & Video, which you cite — don’t yet have subsections at all. And third, in most of the departments that do have subsections, they’re not comprehensive (especially in Games).

The last two problems are related, in that we don’t have enough data to subcategorize those items in a useful way, let alone any mechanism to populate the subcategories if we did. We've been doing an extensive open card-sorting exercise <http://usability.gov/design/cardsort.html> over the past few weeks to help us determine the overall categorization for 2.0 (and we’ll publish results of that soon), but now someone needs to do intensive card-sorting on individual departments. For example, give someone names, screenshots, and descriptions of 70 games — balanced between those currently available for Ubuntu, and those not — and ask them to put the games in whatever categories make sense to them. Repeat with a dozen more people, and collate the results. If anyone would like to organize that, please let us know.

For 3.0, we have done two things to tackle this problem:
1. As I predicted in my previous comment, we've replaced the two-pane department screen with a one-pane screen that ends with an "All {number}" link.
2. In some places, e.g. "Science & Engineering" > "Mathematics", we've hidden non-application items by default with a "Show {number} technical items" link.

What I have not had time to do, though, is any further research on adding more subsections to reduce the length of the "Accessories", "Education", "Office", "Sound & Video", "System", or "Themes & Tweaks" departments. If any usability lab, HCI class, or LoCo would like to help out with Ubuntu, it would be great if they could take even one of these departments and run a card-sorting exercise to work out what the subsections should be.

I have now specified subcategories for "Tweaks & Themes" and "Sound & Video". They won't be implemented until the Ubuntu archives have debtags (bug 57418).

Once they are implemented, I think the remaining tasks to fix this bug will be:
- subcategorize, shorten, or replace "Accessories"
- subcategorize, shorten, or replace "Education"
- subcategorize, shorten, or replace "Fonts"
- subcategorize, shorten, or replace "Office"
- subcategorize, shorten, or replace "System".

With more and more games being added I would suggest more subcategories for games, such as "Action."

Also, on the Website I cannot see the Simulation category. Does the website use a different categorization?
If so, why?

Daan W, a subcategory for Shooter games is bug 626414.