I just visited a friend of mine. She's not all that technically oriented. I installed Ubuntu on her laptop for her a while ago, and she's very happy with it.
Now, 6 months later, I visited her house, and watched her start up the computer and use it to browse a website.
She started it up, and logged in.
After login, the panel etc. loaded up. There's a white-on-orange star in the panel to indicate that there are software updates. Attached to this is a floating speech-bubble style notification.
The notification contains an icon, and some text. The text says something like "there are important updates to apply to your system. click the icon to install them."
I watched my friend apparently dismiss the notification, and continue with loading up firefox. I said "wait a minute -- those are important updates. they probably include security updates. you should apply them." She replied "I keep trying to, but it never works. It says to click the icon, so I do, and then the box disappears and the system doesn't do anything about it."
She'd been clicking the large icon in the notification balloon. Not the icon in the panel.
So, all this time, she'd never been getting updates.
This is a serious security/usability issue. I'm checking the "security vulnerability" box, because the usability error probably means many people out there are not keeping their system up to date, despite their best intentions.
It would probably be fixable by removing the "wrong" icon from the notification balloon. Or by making that icon actually work to launch update manager.
The exact text is "Click on the notification icon to show the available updates." Removing the icon from the bubble itself might help, but the text would still expect people to (a) know what an "icon" is and (b) realize that, despite appearances, the orange-and-white blob is an icon.
I'm going to be boring here and suggest the same solution I've been suggesting since 2005: abolish the icon and bubble, and instead open the updates window directly. That way the updates would be easier to understand and require fewer clicks to install.
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