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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 know why people view KDE as the easy to use linux desktop environment. Xfce has taken that spot on my list since I discovered Xfce4 over a year ago. I've always viewed KDE as the complete and fully featured desktop environment that has a fancy working gui for absolutely everything and a matching integrated(looking) application for all the major tasks.
This would have been much more interesting if they had tested the users on 4 or 5 different linux desktops. Maybe Gnome, KDE, Xfce4, then throw in ion or ratpoison for fun.
I'm still waiting for some sort of objective comparison of major X11 environments against OSX and Windows XP. But I don't think that sort of thing is possible in this day and age.
Personally, while I like and have found good things in just about every desktop ( and I've used them all ) I've pretty much fallen for fvwm2. Fvwm2 allows me to customize everything by forcing me to customize everything. Hell, I had to configure the focus policies by hand. Of course, now that I've done it and made several backups of the configuration so I never have to do it again, I have created what is the closest I have ever gotten to my ideal graphical environment. It also looks really cool too.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Take the most common 20% of the options, the ones most likely to be used by the 80% of the users, and present those. At the bottom, have an "advanced" button that reveals the other 80% of the configuration options.
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2B1ASK1
As attributed to the "Web and Design Specialist, Government" at http://www.userinstinct.com/viewpost.php?postid=kd e33review&page=10:
"So this is UNIX? I like it. I'd totally use it. As long as I could use Photoshop"
Should we clap or cry? Dunno, but it's progress.
Is it just me or does it seem stupid that all these people with impressive titles, some with "some Linux" experience, were baffled by the fact that the password wasn't shown at login? I mean surely people working in IT should have used unix-like operating systems at some point and hence be familiar with this?
Good heavens, yes. I'm sure you can turn it off, but that's not the point. By default a new user's desktop should be like a blank slate with some well-marked, obvious signposts to where you can find the tools you need.
Back when I was insane^H^H^H^H^H^Hcompiling Gentoo every couple of weeks, I remember that I was really pleased to see what GNOME 2.0 looked like out of the box, without all the stuff Red Hat was putting on the desktop. Simple, powerful, easy to configure (from the point of view of a long-time configuration file editing user). I switched to KDE a couple of times (although I can't recall if I did so under Gentoo...I think I did) and was blown away with all the stuff that was sitting in the way of recognizing the desktop's important features.
Call me a GNOME zealot, if you must, but I really think they've hit just what I want from a desktop.
Here's the kicker: I still wish I had a way to make MacOS X on my Powerbook more like GNOME 2.6. By default the dock had about twice as many applications as I could reasonably want. I want more keyboard combinations, and I want to configure them as I wish (like I can in GNOME's configuration editor). On the other hand, I'd like GNOME's nautilus to pick up some tips from Finder and I'd like to have application groups in Metacity. (Or whatever they're called where you Atl-Tab to an application and then Alt-` among the windows for that application. I think Metacity has something similar to this, but I'm not sure how good it's working and last I checked it wasn't on by default.)
Flame on!
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
The term is Progressive Disclosure. It's basic human interface design. This is why open source projects don't pass these studies with flying colors - rather than ask UI experts to solve UI issues, we ask slashdot. Then we all hash it around until one underrated post manages to reinvent the wheel.
Here's a better question.. how dow we sell open source to HID people?
This is the desired behaviour from a security point of view. It's something that people can get used to fast too, it only confuses on the first try. And it's only the default, you can change it if you think security is stupid, it may even be slack-kde specific default but I wouldn't recommend changing it.
Yes they should be on by default
This is where it gets interesting. Do you want to please people who will only ever use kde once, or do you want to please people who will use kde all the time?
Yes, kde has enough options to be confusing on *the first time you use it*. This is the only sample group they tested. Why don't they have these same people use kde everyday and come back and say if they still want all the options hidden.
This is where the gnome ui designers went wrong. They took away all the options and messed up their desktop trying to be the best DE for first day users. Then the users use it for a few weeks and are no longer first time users and switch to something more meaty. This is a complicated thing to think about and I don't think it's worth it to change the interfaces based on sloppy investigations. You have to look at much larger groups of users and see how you can please them all. I'm thinking it's impossible to please everyone, but it's possible to please 90% of new users and 90% of experienced users as well.
Besides all of this, isn't there something called kde-kiosk that lets you turn off all the options? isn't this something done at a distribution level rather than kde-project level?
I say let the kde group fix upstream fixes and let the distributions fix their own bugs. IE if you're a distro targetting users who've never used kde, you fix the ui the way you need it, while if you target advanced users, you fix the ui the way you need it. Let the kde project make kde more maleable and let the distros do the final moulding of the user experience.
Liberty.
I believe that the solution is to have a progressive desktop. Level 1 would be for beginners, and level 5 would have options for power users. The given level would alter the display of buttons, menus, balloon help messages, and the configuration options displayed.
The simple fact is that you can't please everybody, and trying to do so in a complex UI results in an interface that is *not* ideal.
I have to say this yet again, because I think it's terribly important for people to understand: studies like this are merely trivial.
While it is a worthwhile goal to create a desktop that creates an initial good impression on a newbie, it should not be the primary goal, or even a major goal. That is because the newbie will NEVER be the primary user! As heretical as it sounds, no one ever stays a newbie forever.
Usability studies need to be directed towards intermediate users. Those who have been exposed to the system for more than thirty minutes. I don't give a stack of meadow muffins how easy a system is for a newbie if it turns out to be difficult for me. I don't want to make a choice between the newbie and the expert, but if a choice had to be made, I would rather reward my long time loyal customer than someone just sniffing around for a good deal.
So here's how to do the next study. Don't base it on the anecdotal statements of a few people. Give the test subjects the destkop a week to get acclimated with the destkop. Don't ask them their feelings but observe their actual behavior (use a video camera if you have to). Try to get a control group or control desktop in place. And don't confuse the user with a usability expert
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Please, MERCY, stop putting pressure on the KDE developers so that they turn KDE into a Windoze kind of sh*tty UI, just in order to please the newbs.
The problem now is that KDE is too much like Windows. I've been a KDE user since 1.x (and am typing this in KDE 3.3.0), and even I can admit that KDE suffers from largely the same UI problems that plague many Microsoft apps.
Specifically:
1) Lots of toolbars full of lots of cryptic, hard-to-decipher icons. It was the UI-disaster called MS Office that made this style of app popular. Most KDE apps copy this style. Konqueror is laid out like Internet Explorer (> 10 icons in toolbar), instead of like Firefox or Safari (~5 icons in the toolbar).
2) Ultra-long menus and context menus. It's Microsoft and Windows that popularized the 20-item context menu, which KDE faithfully copies.
3) Multiple places to configure functionality of application. KDE's settings menu copies this nicely, though it's not as bad as what Microsoft does with Visual Studio (which puts configuration both under the File menu and the Tools menu).
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I read this article before it hit /. so I'm a little surprised by how many people are posting the same comment (to add an advanced dialog mode) at the same time I agree to some degree. If you've used KDE lately you know there are quite a few dialogs where there are "advanced" buttons. For instance, the "Style" gui window has only 4 widgets, not counting apply/cancel. One of them is an "advanced settings" button.
Of course, like anything there is a lot of room for improvement. I think as more apps are moved over to the new KconfigXT system it will be easier for folks to tweak and improve dialogs. This library lets people describe the settings instead of coding them into a dialog.
I also don't think the invisible password thing is a KDE default. It might be slakware's. I compiled (emerged) kde from source and my login screen shows the stars.
They'll think I've lost control again and leave it all to evolution. -- Supreme Being, Time Bandits
... Well, it is still an issue for KDE, because they haven't made the (quite far-reaching) changes to their priorities needed to get developers thinking about usability. Gnome have done this much better IMHO, and KDE has even suffered because lots of the software geeks who want "options everywhere" have moved to KDE... making the user base even less typical of the Joe Average user.
But in the long term, I am sure KDE will make strides - the Akademy seems to have focused on this area, and KDE are a great project which can develop at lightning speed.
In any case, the real issues for the "free desktop" as a whole are now elsewhere. This would be my first approximation:
* office suite. OpenOffice is good... it's almost as good as MSOffice. But it needs to be BETTER, in order to get people and institutions to switch. After all, 90% of ordinary people's computer time is spent working with office-type applications.
* hardware. I have this sweet Gnome desktop... but I have just spent a day trying to get my printer to work, with NO help from the GUI. Hotplug and HAL are a start but it's not just about recognizing hardware, it's about an easy way to troubleshoot it. Is my problem hardware related, or a kernel problem, or a driver, or is it CUPS or foomatic? I don't know!
* Help systems. Gnome and KDE have great manuals for individual programs. They don't have task-based HOWTO guides, or troubleshooting guides, saying "how do I connect to my friend's workstation" or "I can't get online, what's wrong?"
* Stack integration. We have a great kernel. And we have (at least) two great desktops. And in the middle we have... well, an assortment of GNU and BSD tools, distro-specific stuff, little programs that someone wrote, each with their own config file.... Again, the Novell stuff and the freedesktop stuff isn't a bad start, but we really want *one single way* to manage startup services, for example, so that GUI tools can be written which will work with every distribution (without writing 10 distro-specific backends). The advantage to this is that when there is "one true way", it is much easier to build stuff that can assume the "one true way" is being used. (Note: this is perfectly compatible with diversity, experimentation, Gobolinux etc. etc. - just remember, experimentation can be aimed at *improving the next generation of the standard*.)
* In general: "finish". This is related to the stack integration point but it is more abstract. Let me give you an example. I use Debian. I need to change the time, due to an obscure 2.6 bug relating to APM which makes my clock run at 4x speed. I read "man hwclock". It tells me about how to use hwclock to set the time, and that I can automatically adjust to make up for a slow clock. So I do that. Then, by chance, I read "/usr/share/doc/util-linux/README.Debian.hwclock.g z"...
and it tells me all about how hwclock is dangerous and must not be used! You see? The same distro is giving me inconsistent information in two different sources!
Another example: network interfaces. I can access these in so many different ways. "ifconfig". "ifup" and "ifdown". The scripts in "/etc/init.d". And each of these different levels is built upon the others... and I often don't know which one to go in at... and if I use one level, I may break the assumptions of the other level. Similarly, how do I configure samba?
So IMHO "finish" is the big one. It's about turning a big heap of user-contributed software, into a single consistent centralized system. That's where distros come in, but at the moment, those distros aren't really doing their job. They are just whacking out 6-monthly releases with the latest cool stuff all chucked in there. Debian is better - kudos for a slow, careful release cycle and a high standard for package maintenance - but still, as a desktop, it ain't there. We should be aiming for a distro release to be usable for *years*, not months - my Mum still uses Windows 98, why is this seen as "old-fashioned" if it
There are two options: implement an 'Advanced' button for every configuration page/tab, or have one global 'Advanced' button. If you're an advanced user, then you would really hate to have to click the 'Advanced' button on every new configuration page/tab.
I think you should have one global setting (normal/advanced), and an 'Advanced' or 'Normal' button on every configuration page/tab, dependent on the global setting.
Back in the old MS-DOS days, many programs (like PC Tools) did have an Normal/Advanced option in the menu system, so users could choose how complex the menu system would be. This made the programs easy enough for novice users, yet advanced/feature-rich enough for advanced users.
Next problem is to decide which option will be available under 'Advanced' and not under 'Normal'.
BTW: having good context-sensitive help information and tooltip information for each configuration option is IMHO at least as important as having a 'Normal'/'Advanced' option.
If a novice user doesn't know what a configuration option means, having good and easily accessible help information makes the difference between making an informed choise and a random choise, between 'good enough for nerds' and 'good enough for Joe Average'.
I know it sounds like GNU-style recursion and a bit silly at first, but we've used this and users applaud it, from rookies and gurus.
Simply put, make the default set of options the ones that are most commonly used and easiest for beginners to understand. Add in an editor for "Experience Level" or something like that, and have that editor provide a slider (or whatever) that, when set, will gradually reveal more or less detail in the options presented to the user.
The result: new users aren't overwhelmed with settings they don't understand and probably shouldn't mess with, and advanced users can set the experience level once, and forever have every configurable setting at their fingertips.