Conducting a Unix Desktop Usability Study?

cyclop asks: "I am a close friend of a Ph.D. student on human interface usability. She's now working to tailor a KDE-vs-Gnome usability study (a pretty hot topic these days), and I have been called to help, as a long time GNU/Linux desktop user. What kind of advice -- both technical and theoretical -- would you give us on conducting a deep and objective study on the Unix desktop, that can be useful for the developers and the OSS community?" "She has installed GNU/Linux and used both KDE and Gnome to get to know them, while I provided her a number of links on background information and previous usability studies on both DE, and advised her to subscribe to relevant mailing lists of both projects. However, I feel that it's not enough and that there are a lot of potential pitfalls and misconceptions that wait for us, me being a geek and she being a Linux newbie. Moreover, she found that most of the previous studies on the web were quite sloppy, in comparison with common usability research standards."

Comments

Re:Don't get my hopes up.

[Hosiah]

You also go out of your way to diminish the importance of Windows. I am certainly no fan myself, but it is used by over 90% of all users today and the Windows interfaces are by far the interfaces someone is the most likely to know about.

WHY??? WHY DO IDIOTS LIKE YOU PERSIST IN WAXING SUCH STUPID BULLSHIT AND KNOWING THAT NO SAPIENT SPECIES EXISTS THAT IS STUPID ENOUGH TO FALL FOR IT??? WHY BOTHER TO POST??? NO, YOU'RE NO FAN - YOU ONLY WORSHIP MICROSOFT AND SLOB ON BILLY'S KNOB, THAT'S ALL!!!

Making sure your interface system looks and feels totally unlike what 90% of people are used to is not going to ease people into using your system.

So you still shit in diapers, right? Because the toilet was a different interface from the one you're used to. And you never learned to walk because it looks and feels totally different from crawling. And you never learned to fuck, thank God for the purification of the gene pool, because you already knew the interface of masturbating, and copulation was too different in look and feel. Hey, I already refuted this point in the original post. Remember? Go back and read where it says the year Microshit first released Win-Duhs. Note how long computers existed before that. For 90% of the history of computers, WE'VE USED NON-WINDOWS INTERFACES. In fact, since Unix was running on a PDP-series (the closest the technology would allow to a general purpose desktop system) before Bull Gay-ts ever touched a computer, WE HAVE HAD UNIX INTERFACES FOR MUCH LONGER THAN WINDOWS INTERFACES. Windows should be learning from Unix, not the other way around. So why didn't the all-holy status quo effect apply to the initial adoption of Windows? Wasn't it radically different from what not 90%, but 100% of users knew before? Why did Microshit ever go from the command line to the GUI in the first place, if it's such an huge issue to switch interfaces? Hey, Socrates, I think we found a break in your AIRTIGHT FUCKING LOGIC, HUH?

No, the truth is, morons like you only found the first interface you accidentally stumbled upon, learned enough to use it without embarassing yourself by trying to reboot it by shaking the monitor upside down or yelling into the mouse, and now you want to force it on everybody else just so YOUR LAZY ASS doesn't have to learn anything new. Well, forget it. We'll continue to innovate and advance technology like we were doing before there was a Windows. It's WORTH working our asses off to make and give away a free operating system, just to see the stock (presumably purchased within a week of your having secured your five-digit /. ID) for your pisshole company go down the crapper. Stay in your cave. Civilization will go on advancing without you as it always has done anyway, Neanderthal.