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KDE 3.3 UI, Evaluated By 7 Real Users
sgtrock writes "UserInstinct has an article that documents the reactions to KDE 3.3 by 7 users with limited or no Linux background. By and large, they found KDE intrguing, but far too busy. They all complained about some pretty basic UI issues; no stars echoed while the password was typed, anti-aliased fonts off by default, far too many options shown by default, etc. Most had minor UI issues as well; some of which were KDE specific, others that weren't.
All in all, I would have to regard this test KDE 3.3's UI as somewhat disappointing. Especially since KDE strives so hard to provide a consistent and easy to use UI.
IMO the single biggest issue is probably the overwhelming number of options that are exposed to a first-time user. Personally, I'm a guy who likes to tweak almost everything on a UI, so I love the way that KDE works. However, I have seen myself just how quickly beginners get turned off by the very busy option screens. There must be a better way of showing a sane number of options while still allowing power users to access the more esoteric ones. Anyone have any thoughts?"
I don't want to make 101 decisions when I work on my computer. I want sensible defaults and not have to care about plethoras of unneeded options.
Many times, options are offered as a lazy hack instead of making a UI really usable. If 9 out of 10 users need some advanced option checked, why isn't it on by default? Why is the alternate behavior even needed?
I also think that checkboxes are sometimes offered by the programmer who can't decide how he wants his app to behave. By offering multiple behaviors, he escapes having to commit to one or the other under the guise of offering the user more. But unless you have nothing better to do than to twiddle checkboxes on and off all day, most users won't touch the defaults, meaning that all those options the programmer thought he was offering are in fact unused.
The better way to UI design is to decide what the task is and then to offer a default behavior that best offers it. If there is indeed an alternate that could be prefered by some, perhaps multiple options can be ganged together and toggled with one switch. I do this in my text editor configuration: The option to type with the words wrapped at the window margin is coupled with not setting an auto-textwidth (auto-truncation of lines at a given length) and with using tabs as true tab characters. The opposite is to auto-truncate at a set width, ignore the window margin, and use spaces instead of tabs since the two most basic behaviors are to enter text to preserve line formatting and to ignore it.
Most options aren't really options. And you have to realize that those offered have the potential to confuse more than to help. Once you develop a highly conservative perspective about offering options, you begin to value each one offered more. Besides, if the so-called power users really are, let them fiddle with configuration files, registries and source code like they claim to understand. Just don't bog down the average user!
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
KDE is more volunteer driven, hence it aims to appeal to fellow developers and home power users, for whom configurability and features are wanted.
As a biased KDE user, I think it has the potential to be better than Gnome on the corporate desktop. However this study is right, there are too many 'in your face' options. I agree that KDE needs to cut back on the number of buttons, menu entrys, context menu entries and configuration options shown at the top level. Examples:
There are items in the study I think are dumb, KMail is a fine name for the KDE email client, much better than Kamel (or whatever the suggestion was).
The KDE project is making movements in the right direction, there is a nascent KDE-Usability project. Gnome has gone too far in usability through streamlining, KDE hasn't gone far enough, yet.
Of course all that's opinion, but I say it anyway.
Alex