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Gnome 2.6 Usability Review

Posted by timothy on from the depends-which-five dept.

TuringTest writes ""The user-centric UI webzine" UserInstinct has published a usability overview of the latest version of the GNOME desktop. While their conclusions and recommendations are not mind-blowing, it includes two interesting appendices with a survey of new users (and their reactions to the system) and a list of common tasks of modern computer users with a commentary on how Gnome performs in each one. Note that usually You Only Need to Test With 5 Users (this report tests 4), you need to test additional users when an interface has several highly distinct groups of users and thus the conclusions in this review should not be taken as definitive."

14 of 424 comments (clear)

  1. Project GoneME by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Hello,

    I have started a little project which is intended to get the GNOME Desktop into a different direction. It's not aimed for people who love GNOME as it is now - No, it's more aimed to those who are experts to Unix and who like and wish so many times that some of the changes that went into GNOME never happened. The project was started yesterday and the first patches to *fix* the buttonorder (as one of many ideas and points) were created already. I plan to create the outstanding *fixes* for correcting the buttonorder in the upcoming days (as I have time) and then like to head over to other things that I personally like to have fixed. The project is not aimed to be a cooperation with the core GNOME it's more private work that I started for my own needs.

    In case someone is interested then feel free to read more about it on the Project GoneME page. Please do not expect huge wonders, it's just a test to see if people might be interested or not. As said it mainly covers my own interests at the moment. Please also don't put to much value in my brought up project description, they need to be reworked and altered anyways. I wrote the stuff as they came into my mind.

    1. Re:Project GoneME by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Simple and worthy ideas. Hail to you. I do wish the newer gnome offerings subscribed to the ideas of least suprise. "i'll just mouse over here and click ok.. eh, its cancel, wheres ok gone, oh - its over there. wtf?!"

      gconf is a terrible idea. Actually most of the lets reinvent everything glib stuff is a bad idea. As if the ridiculous type casting requirements in gtk+, and the over complicated signal mechanism. Hey you can connect anything to anything - fine, but make the simple callback case work, and don't just remarshall the bloody arguments behind my back! Gosh, that feels better... cheers.

    2. Re:Project GoneME by tomhudson · · Score: 1, Interesting
      I agree! Putting the cancel on the left and the okay on the right is WEIRD! Most of us read left-to-right, and would expect the action we want to take (which should also be the default action) to be the first one.

      Every time I go into gnome I'm reminded why I prefer either the KDE or a black screen tty. It's just fucked up!

      Of course, this "study" is also 86ed. The "it's better because it looks and works more like windows" and "we can improve it by making it look even more like windows" crap fails to consider that most people who leave windows WANT something different.

      It's not like they can't learn to do stuff differently. They have to with every version of windows anyway. Sheesh. Slow news day, I guess.

    3. Re:Project GoneME by Vitus+Wagner · · Score: 2, Interesting
      Is this for unix geeks? Hamper networking by removing esound - only right architecture decision GNOME ever had?


      Typically UNIX geeks work in highly distributed environment and need networking sound server more than anyone else.


      If you were about replacing esound with NAS or rplay, there would be something to talk of.


      Really we need some project like this - for real unix geeks. There are lot of more or less useful things which are written for GNOME or KDE only. I need to keep GTK and GNOME libs with all associated stuff like gconf only for few useful apps like The Gimp and planner.


      I can outline some goals of the project which would make GNOME apps more integratable with traditional Unix desktop

      1. Write X Resources backend to gconf, so GNOME apps would automatically pick up your Xaw and Motif settings
      2. Make drop-in replacements for libesound which would allow to use any of audioservers out there.
      3. Fix ICCCM support to
      4. Make other IPC systems used in GNOME work over ICCCM to allow apps, started from different hosts interoperate via X server.
    4. Re:Project GoneME by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Interesting
      thanks for the link. I'll comment on it below :-)

      I would disagree. I first started developing software way back when (before DOS), and the default action was always the first in line.

      when I moved to dos, any text dialog I made also had the default as the first, in a left-to-right sequence. It just seemed the normal thing to do.

      Windows didn't exist then, so it couldn't have been "contaminaton" from windows.

      Thanks for finding the reference. Now I can kill the BS (which is what it is) in the Gnome reference:

      The argument basically is that with left-right, top-bottom readers, your eye is left resting on the lower right corner of a window when you are done reading text. That makes the lower right corner the first thing you read when you are done with a block of text. Thus it is the most quickly acquired option, *AND* is conceptually first in your list of choices even if you scan the other buttons. This effect is particularly important when you start only glancing through the text to recognize the type of dialogue it is (rather than actually reading), which is where this shaves off irritation and inconvenience (that is, when you don't have to read all the choices because of familiarity, its nice to have the most common choice presented first).

      This is all very nice in theory, but overlooks several facts:

      1. the dialog is in another window, so people are not looking at the bottom right.
      2. this would only apply to screens of text, and only screens of continuous text. Most web pages, for example, don't fit this model
      3. when a dialog opens up, people who read left-to-right are going to visually acquire the new window, then start reading left-to-right. It's not a continuation of the previous window.

      That's why it's so irritating.

      People tend to organize spatial information using some sort of heirarchy. That is, you might spatially orient Las Vegas by knowing it is in Nevada, by knowing Nevada is in the U.S., by knowing the U.S. is in the American Continent. This has suprising effects on things like scanning speeds. Things that are 30 pixels apart but in the same "parent region" can seem closer than things that are 20 pixels apart but in a different parent region. But I digress.

      He (the author) is making a seriously wrong assumption, that all the users are the same sex. Men and women have different methods of orienting themselves (do a google of "sex difference brain orientation spatial maze" and read the results).

      A second wrong assumption is that people have to "navigate" their desktop. Most people do a lot of things on autopilot - like drive the same route to and from work. No conscious navigation required.

      We assume that the window is the parent region for the buttons. Thus your information about the button's position largely follows from the position of the dialogue window. It turns out that some areas of the parent region are "hotter" than others, that is it is easier to retain a strong sense of their relationship to the parent. Things in the corners have the strongest retainable relationship to the parent, followed by something in the exact center, followed by things on the edges. For a left-right, top-bottom reader, the hottest part of the window is the upper left corner (where we put the titlebar, which needs to be scanned very quickly when dealing with multiple windows), followed by the lower right corner. (note this is not Fitt's law, it is much weaker than Fitt's law which impacts actual "pointer" motion, not just scanning, but its still a significant effect)

      The title bar is the hottest area? Total bull. How many people even look at the title bar any more? It's not the hottest area visually, and it never was. I remember back in the '90s writing apps, I decided to try putting status messages, etc., in the title bar - they were completely unseen. Hell, you can put up a web page full of jokes and a title that says "If y

  2. I use ion2 with gnome _and _ kde applications by ClarkEvans · · Score: 2, Interesting

    ion2

    For those with FreeBSD who hate the mouse...
    # cd /usr/ports/x11-wm/ion-2
    # make install

  3. Will gnome die? by omar_armas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I tried hard to use Gnome 2.6 as my primary desktop, but I gave up in favor of KDE.
    Some reasons:

    -Too slow
    -not so well integrated
    -doesn't feel a unified system(shortcuts, menus, etc)
    -Again, too slow. Every release it gets slower.

    The have changed enlightenment for sawfish, then for the actual wm.
    The same happened for the file manager: gmc, then nautilus
    And for the browser: galeon, nautilus, epiphany, now mozilla?
    A very poor control center. Example: try to add virtual desktops from the control center. It's impossible, it's hidden in the desktops applets.
    It's a mess, since the people funding the project dedicated to other things, Gnome seems to have lost direction.
    To me, Gnome is just a desktop bar, all the enviroment and other apps doesn't feel really integrated.

    Omar

  4. Interested in knowing by timmyd · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Has anyone done usability tests on GNOME (or KDE for that matter) with respect to internationalization? Last time I checked, most applications are written just for the English speaker and typer. It seems like to get a good setup with all the programs in the appropriate language, you need to restrict yourself to a specialized distribution..which isn't a great option if you need to support more than one language.

    With gtk2's new input module support, it has made it easier to input languages which require a more complex method, but that is only limited to those gtk2 programs. So if you were using KDE, I think you would have to use input methods that talk through X, which are very unfriendly. On the other hand, it seems like windows has the advantage here of everything using the same toolkit which has pretty good internationalization support.

  5. Tests with five users by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    This is off-topic so you can moderate accordingly, but is there a similar limit for governments? For example, in science fiction there is often the assumption that a single world government is the most efficient, but perhaps some other number would actually be better. Competing economic systems and philosophies might actually be beneficial, so the fall of communism might not have been the unalloyed good fortune it seems -- after all, the space race is what actually pushed us to the moon.

    It seems to me this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they created the United States, to have several groups of people not only in cooperation but in competition with each other so new ideas would be continually generated and tried, but I'd be curious to see other's ideas if this comment is still visible.

  6. Certification by IceFox · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I like the idea of creating a HIG certification program of sort, but not for Gnome, but for all of the Unix/Linux desktop. Why? If you have a Gnome certification then of course core Gnome gnome apps will strive to be compliant and so will some others, but it wont really go farther than that.

    Maybe start a freedesktop.org project. This way open office, KDE, Gnome, SDL, wine (hehe), and other applications will be interested in making sure that their applications are compliant. It will probably be harder, but the payoff will be a hundred times better. Not only will you get Gnome apps all interacting with each other, but you will have all the rest of the Linux/BSD/Unix apps working alone side nicely.

    Another reason why this would be a good freedeskop.org project is because all of the other work that is being done there. Stuff like making sure your application uses the standard desktop icon names when referencing icons (so either Gnome or KDE icon sets work in both KDE and Gnome apps).

    Having a little list of current compliment HIG applications would be a major incentive for apps to get on that list too. Maybe it would even spawn a little compitition about keeping/getting all of their apps (kde/gnome/etc) compliant.

    -Benjamin Meyer

    --
    Do you changes clothes while making the "chee-chee-cha-cha-choh" transformation sound?
  7. The most anoying usability-quirk in gnome.. by Mr2cents · · Score: 1, Interesting

    They put buttons in the 'wrong' order.. Normally it's Ok/Cancel, with Gnome it's Cancel/OK!

    Aaaarg!

    --
    "It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
  8. Re:Needs one more user... by MBCook · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I'm not sure that I've ever seen a beginner who isn't "hesitant".

    When users become more accustom to computers and they are intermediate, some users will charge head on into things and get them selves into trouble. Some don't. It just depends.

    But I've observed MANY people in my short career of helping neighbors and friends and such with their computers. When they are beginners, they fall into one of three categories. The first is those who hate the comptuer and fight it all the way. They learn how to do a thing or two and use that, and that's it. They won't do anything more because they could break something, etc. It's more than being hesitant.

    The second group would include my little sister. They learn what they're doing and will explore a tiny bit, but by and large stick to what they know how to do and programs they know. In those programs, they may explore and they'll become very familiar and comfortable with them. But when it comes to doing something new, they are hesitant.

    The third group is hesitant about everything. They are like the first group in that they never branch out into new things (group two will over time, very slowly). They just stick to what they know. That said, they don't feel like they are fighting the computer and are comfortable using the program. But they do no exploring like group two. They only learn things when they need them, and ignore them the rest of the time.

    Thinking about it the only group I can think of who ISN'T hesitant is the very little kid. I'm talking 2 or 3 years old. They don't know to be scared of the computer (or even consider being scared of it). They'll plow into the computer head on and they may break it. But I wouldn't consider these kids "users"; at least in the normal sense. They may use a program or two (Putt Putt Goes to the Moon, The Busy World of Richard Scarey, whatever) but they don't use the computer, you know what I mean?

    So in conclusion, there really aren't many "non-hesitant" users out there. They would be a rare bird (in my expiriance).

    An interesting article though.

    --
    Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
  9. Improved usability by mrgsd · · Score: 1, Interesting

    1) Improve Task-Orientation
    One task that consistently stumped users, causing them to go into exploration, was the initial discovery of where the web browser resided. The seemingly obvious answer eluded users for seconds.

    I can't help but think that GNOME usability would shoot through the roof had they put a porn icon right on the desktop.
    --
    End Communication.
  10. How fast were the computers they used? by AtlanticCarbon · · Score: 2, Interesting

    You'd probably get some nasty comments about gnome's speed if you gave them middle-aged computers.

    Right now gnome's main usability problem is it's speed. That's the only reason I don't use it. I have a 900mhz Duron. Sure it's old but it runs wind32 and qt apps quickly-- quickly enough for most tasks. I hope gtk gets speed tweaks soon. (I've even heard people with recent CPUs saying gtk feels lethargic on their systems.)

    I know the study was aimed at the layout of the desktop and such but let's face it responsiveness is a big part of a user's experience.