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Novell's Releases Linux Usability Testing Videos
sp3298622 writes "Novell is releasing primary desktop research, including over 200 videos and analysis of usability tests, at betterdesktop.openSUSE.org. Vice president of collaboration and desktop engineering for Novell, Nat Friedman: As a programmer, it's sometimes difficult to know how ordinary people with no technical experience are reacting to your software. Linux people tend to know other Linux people. In these usability tests, we selected test subjects who were experienced with Windows, but who had never heard of Linux, and asked them to perform basic tasks using the Linux desktop."
In addition to BetterDesktop, the Tango Project has finally been announced!
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"The Tango Desktop Project exists to create a consistent user experience for free and Open Source software with graphical user interfaces."
Might this only result in the Linux desktop becoming more like Windows?
While I've seen things like this before, I'm liking Novell's approaches to Open Source more an more these days. With the excellent SUSE 10 (still may replace Ubuntu on my main workstation) and projects like Beagle and Hula, they're set to really make a splash if they take this useability idea seriously. They seem to be gelling more on the desktop than anyone else of late, 3 years ago who'd have expected Novell to be doing this? Awesome.
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That's funny, that url points to betterdesktop.org.. Is this subliminal advertising now? o_O
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10,000 /doters render http://betterdesktop.ximian.com/video/ unusable.
I read
As a programmer, it's sometimes difficult to know how ordinary people with no technical experience are reacting to your software.
How about "always completly fscking impossible" for more precision.
Not that there's nothing to gain from training and experience in usability design. Far from it: it will let you skip many obvious problems, and help you resolve others that users find for you in better and more efficient ways. But until your interface is tested on "real people" in at least a couple of iterations, there is no way in hell you can call it "good", "finished", or anything of the sort. If you don't agree, you've probably never done any real usability trials. There are always surprises. Often really big ones.
Your fine tuned detail somewhere may work just as plannned, but it will easily be swamped by problems stemming from inadvertent signals the interface is sending which never occurred to you, or from assumptions you never questioned or even spotted, which utlim ately make people (rightfully!) misunderstand the whole metaphor and do the wrong thing.
There are good news though: If you are willing to really really accept that the user is right (the way people percieve your product is in fact the way they perceive it, and you won't be around to explain to them that their thinking is wrong), and have set aside reasonable time to correct the problems you will find, - usability trials are fun!
Seriously. Fun, enlightening, and humbling (but in feelgood way), and they will broaden your horizons by illustrating just how differently from your daily assumptions it is not just possible but common to think. Do them. You'll like it.
Just resist the urge to explain the problem to the subject (except to be able to move on to test other things). Write down the problem in stead. The trial is for your instruction, not theirs.
sudo ergo sum
Has anyone seen what they've done with flash on that site? Their titles are all individual flash applets just displaying some text in a fancy (but ugly) font. For a Linux site this is rather appalling.
were you expecting to see a sig here? perhaps you'd rather see the inside of an ambulance!
The best way to do usability tests is actually to conduct small tests with 5-7 participants. Any more and you just get loads of people tripping up on the same damn issues over and over again. It's a much better idea to do a small usability test, fix the issues tha come up and then do another small test to find any new ones. Repeat until you only find very minor issues. If the point of usability tests was to get an accurate statistic on what percentage of users can complete a ceratin task then you'd have a point, but it *isn't*. That said, having a diverse testing poulation is still desirable but it certainly isn't required. As long as the people testing aren't the actual developers yoiu'll get valuable feedback anyway.
"If you don't have a diverse testing population, you aren't going to produce meaningful results. The idea is fine and all, but the results are mostly useless."
This isn't correct. If 99.99% of the computer users where white males that live in their mothers basement then it would be foolish to target black college females at all in the test.
The question is "Who is their target market?"
I personally would love to use ANY desktop except Windows but here is what I need.
1. Games - I hate to say it but games like EQII need to run on a version of Linux and run well. Oh yeah and be supported by SOE.
2. Video card drivers need to be easier to load. I don't have to jack with the kernel in Microsoft Windows to load a new video driver, yet it "can" be a pain in Linux. Novell/SuSE does a good job with this for Nvidia drivers. I should be able to go out and buy a new video card, then load the driver for it for SuSE. I should not be required to recompile the kernel.
3. Wireless card access. While this is ok, it still has a LONG way to go before it is good. Novell could work with the top wireless companies to help make this a lot better. Heck good Centrino support would be a nice step.
4. Printer drivers - Heck hardware drivers in general. While this is ok, Novell could work with the top manufacturers to make sure that they support SuSE out of the box. So HP/Lexmark/Cannon and Dell.
Now another step would be to work with Adobe/Macromedia to port all their apps to Linux, heck perhaps Novell should work on a general process to help developers port their software to Linux. Specifically SuSE linux.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I must commend Ubuntu for making Samba a snap to get up and running using their GUI. Same with printers and disk drives, it's all done via a 'Wizard'.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
Sounds interesting! But I can't find any data regarding that comparison. Sure, there are tests about logging in, but no data about comparing KDM and GDM.
3 Gnome-apps, 2 neutral apps. Where's KDE-apps? Looking at the data-section, I see this:
Again: Where's KDE? Going thropugh the test data I see that every single test was with Gnome. Where's KDE? So instead of being called "Better Desktop", maybe this should be called "Better Gnome" instead? then again, what can we expect from having a Gnome-guy running the show? So much for equal handling of the desktops....
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
You mean the same "respected usability professionals" that publish on websites for which other people feel the need to publish an Opera user Javascript (like Greasemonkey for Firefox) to fix the readability?
Linux is not Windows
First Subtask: Understand what this task actually means. Edit the EXIF data of a JPEG file? Add a symlink to the file? Or what?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
First, I don't want users to mess with system settings unless they are allowed to (e.g. unless they are admins in 'wheel'). I'm happy to support regular users, but not regular users that think they should be adminitering a system they don't understand. I'm not trying to be elitist by stating that only 'qualified' users should try to be admins. Its perfectly fine to drive a car, but that doesn't mean you should be that car's mechanic.
More significantly, why should the clock be off in the first place? Even a supposedly 'user hostile' OS like OpenBSD supports NTP. So, rather than have the users fix a broken clock, why don't we have the computer periodically sync its clock to the correct time. I can't set the clock to within 100 ms, but that is trivial to set it within 20 ms with NTP. Forcing users to fix a problem is inferior to preventing the problem.
Think global, act loco
I find that part about drivers quite ironic.
When I got my current main computer (a prebuilt, since I didn't have access to DIY stuff), it had Windows XP SP1 with it. I spent 6 hours downloading the 33MB sound card driver. Then I had to download the 11MB nVidia driver to go above 640x480. Then there was SP2, and another 20MB of driver crap on Windows Update.
The Slackware 9 CD I had at the time supported all of the hardware straight away. Later on I got the linux nV driver anyway, which was about 7MB and had an auto-install script. Having only had a month's experience with linux back then I can say it was a hell of a lot less painful than getting XP working.
Of course the "easiest" (and therefore the "best") user interface will be the one that is as close to 100% identical to the only one they've used before.
I would have to disagree... I do phone support for a living and help people that have only used windows computers and are not that technically literate and when I ask them to look for a folder in a list they often will look at the files and expect it the entire list to be alphabetical order like on a Mac. I have to correct them and say to look at the top of the listing for yellow folders and look for the folder name there.
The funny thing is that these people have never used a Mac.
Apparently for those who have never used a computer the most logical expectation is that all the files and folders are alphabetical. When I first started using OS X, I found it quite annoying since windows always had it the other way around but take a person who has used windows but never bothered to actually learn it and you'll find they'll expect something else..
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But Linux's TC0 is higher than Windows!
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
It's just difficult to accept that Windows is the best user interface. Particularly because the Windows user interface seems to be changing with every release now.
Not sure I follow you. Are you saying flat out "Windows has the best user interface"?
Because I call bull.
The best user interface is the one that your user can use easily and be most productive in. Sure, for some that will be Windows. For some, Macs. For some, Linux. Heck, I was rather fond of RISC OS.
IME, the great majority of Windows users aren't so much happy with the Windows user interface as used to it. I've lost count of the number of times I've watched somebody working only for a dialog box to pop up and they mutter "go away" under their breath and just click OK without reading it. I swear if I wrote a program which popped up a dialog saying "About to nip around to your house and shoot your dog. You OK with that?", 90% of day-to-day users would just click "OK". That's not easy to use. That's "learnt to put up with".