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?"

Comments

Don't know where

[Apreche]

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.

My take on a few things...

[7-Vodka]

1. no stars echoed while the password was typed:
   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.
2. anti-aliased fonts off by default:
   Yes they should be on by default
3. far too many options shown 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.