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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."
That headline is just embarassing.
Might this only result in the Linux desktop becoming more like Windows?
89% sounds like a very good success ratio for the date and time test. However, RTFA and you'll see that only eleven people participated, most of them female.
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.
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
Developers, you don't get to check in code until you've watched the video of users struggling with your program. OK?
It's a hard thing is to admit that free software has a usability problem. The natural temptation is to sit and watch these videos whilst screaming "You idiots! You don't click "Send and Receive" if you want to send an email! What's wrong with you?!?!"
It is difficult, but it's vitally important. These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want.
The problems on show here are ours, not theirs.
Martin
Missing Tests:
;)
1) Ooops! Find your kernels source, kill X, and install the drivers for your video card. Oh, and updated XF86Config. Or Xorg.conf. Whichever one you happen to have.
2) Damnit, another kernel panic. Find what obscure change caused it to happen this time!
3) Ah, so now you have a wireless card? Try to get it working! You might need to use ndiswrapper. If you get another kernel panic, go back to #2.
4) Ah, can't get above 800x600 resolution, eh? Yeah... find your monitors horizontal and verticle refresh rates. Google it, and you might get lucky.
5) Figure out how to resolve RPM dependancies. Shit, that package needs Python 2.4.2, huh? Ah well, 2.3.9 is installed. Guess you're out of luck.
All joking aside, this was a pretty intresting study.
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
But it ALREADY is in a semblance of English... I mean it looks like English, I can understand every word...
I just can't parse it.
"Novell's Releases Linux Usability Testing Videos"
Let's take it a word at a time.
Novell's Ah, it's got an apostrophe s on the end, so it's either possesive or contractive. As Novell is an entity I'm assuming that we're talking possessive here. Something belonging to Novell. Good start...
Releases. Well, this can't be a verb as we're expecting the noun that is possessed by Novell, so while it might be nice to think that "Novell Releases" is the start of the sentence, instead we're looking at somethings (it's plural) that Novell owns. So Novell's Releases. Some items owned by Novell that have been released. Excellent, now what about these mythic Releases...
Linux... This isn't so good. Linux is a noun, and not a verb... Three nouns in a row? It's probably not unheard of, but in this case I'm expecting a verb. I want to know what Novell's Releases do... Well, let's soldier on and see if the verb appears later... Perhaps Yoda wrote this.
Usability... Nope...
Testing... Hmmm, perhaps test is being used as a verb and the entire portion in front is being used as a compound noun as favoured by Germans...
Videos. Yes, that's it....
The "Releases-Linux-Usability" (whatever that is) owned by Novell is testing Videos!!! Are they testing VCRs? Video Codecs? Movies? Perhaps if I read the article it would tell me.
Or perhaps they REALLY meant "Novell Releases Linux Usability Testing Videos" NAAAAH!
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
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.
That's false. The best interface is one that reflects the user expectations. The Windows interface doesn't reflect user expectations in many ways, so it's possible to create a better interface than one which is just identical.
That should be the aim for the Linux Desktop design, not just to attract former Windows users but to best serve previous Linux users as well.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Personally I think the hardest task for an average user to perform on linux at the moment is driver installation, and lets face it for most people getting all their hardware working is the first step towards adopting a new system. I recently tried installing drivers for my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro a pretty mainstream card from a well known manufacturer, needless to say it's not straight forward by any stretch of the imagination. You simply can't expect joe public to ever learn how to compile his kernel and even messing around with kernel modules is probably asking too much.
Linux is certainly making progress synaptic does a great job of alleviating dependency hell and almost entirely masking it from the end user. I'd like to see the linux community not necessarily looking to emulate the functionality in Windows or Mac OS X but instead looking for what would be the most elegant solution. Perhaps something like an online database of drivers that manufacturers could update, which could be automatically 'pushed' onto your computer overnight and silently rebooted (with your permission in a preferences box) so that you don't even have to worry about having the latest drivers it all becomes automatic would be neat, in the event it failed to reboot it could roll back to the previous driver and notify you in the morning of its attempt.
You could allow users to rate drivers and add the ratings to the database, this way you could specify you only want to automatically update to new drivers that are rated 3/5 or higher for example. This could be like linux's answer to Windows update only better.
You are correct, in theory. You are incorrect in this specific instance because their testing procedure will not yield the information necessary to find a "better" interface.
That is because they are only testing prior Windows users.
Those Windows users have been trained to seek certain items in certain places.
Even if you added a button that said "Complete this test with one click", the users would NOT find it unless they could not FIRST find the Windows button/menu that they were trained to look for of if that button was in that location.Again, I agree with that, but that will not be achievable through these tests.
Microsoft Word used to have an option to use the WordPerfect keystrokes. This was because the people with the most experience found it very difficult to maintain their productivity while learning a new system. Even if that system was "better" for other people. Back then, the most experienced and productive people had spent years learning WordPerfect for DOS.
Novell has learned nothing in these past years. To make it easy to migrate users, you make it an option to have an interface that is 100% identical to what they are familiar with.
Real "usability testing" requires more people with more experience levels on different systems, including people with little or no computer experience at all.
If you REALLY want to make the system easy to use, you have MULTIPLE options:
# 1. Basic level. Almost no menus and lots of "I want to" included in the icon's name ("I want to send an email to someone" or "I want to look at web sites").
# 2. Emulation level. 100% Win2K look-alike.
# 3. Whatever other interface you design.
The key is to build the interface to the user and what the user expects/knows.
Getting the desktop to look like anything except blurry ass requires an hour of reading about how to install your video drivers. Why? Because after installing your package using the really nice script, it still doesn't work. So you google again and figure out you need to edit that ghastly xorg.conf file. And then Google to figure out why the resolution is stuck. And then Googling again to figure out why the refresh is stuck at 54 Hz and giving you a massive headache. Dual monitors? TV out? You may as well just go cry yourself to sleep unless you're an uber-leet nerd, because that stuff takes hours to set up. That shit is a matter of one click in Windows; my mother can do it.
Then there's networking. Support for your wireless adapter may or may not even exist. If it does, it's probably in one of the generic Prism2 drivers or something like that. Great, but it doesn't help me a whole damn lot - mine says Netgear on the front. Back to Google again. It's also intresting to note that Linux's DHCP client and the server in my Linksys didn't get along real well, even on a wired connection. There's no way someone who doesn't know how that crap works would be able to troubleshoot that.
Of course, there's always multimedia playback, right? The install I liked best so far, Unbuntu, couldn't play anything out of the box. I know it should have been able to, but for whatever reason my install was futzed no matter how many times I reinstalled it. I never could figure out how to make it play videos. There were several settings for decoding and such (as well as about 10 different players to choose from), but nothing seemed to change no matter how I tinkered with those settings. Oh, and Unbuntu comes with several options for audio input and output including ALSA and ESD. WTF is the difference? I've heard of ALSA before so I'll use that one. Oh wait, that one doesn't work, but the ESD one does. Well, as long as I hear sound I don't really care. At this point, I don't even want to Google it.
This is why there aren't more Linux desktops: there are severe usability issues. I find it easier to get a webserver complete with PHP and MySQL up and running on Linux than a desktop. Why? Because I don't need video drivers, audio, or wireless networking. I also don't change my server hardware every month or two. Linux makes a great server, for sure. But as great a server as it is, it's a shitty desktop. And you'll please excuse my anger, I just got finished configuring my Linux install and promptly broke it...again.
Here's what desktop distros should be working on:
"I do a grep for shit, bollocks, and tits before checking in code. I'm professional..." -RECURSIVE_META_JOKE, reddit.com
-1, Troll.
Another one bites the dust