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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."
Check out http://www.betterdesktop.org/
You didn't understand. She will conduct the study, but that's not she will judge what's more usable and what's not. This would not be a usability study, it would be a -1,Flamebait article. She plans instead to put categories like WinXP-proficient people,MacOSX-proficient people and total computer noobs (if any still exists) in front of Unix desktop enviroments and see their reactions and if and how they can be proficient with them. She's using them to understand them and for obvious curiosity, and I gave her info to help her tailor the study.
-- Patent no.123456: A way to personalize
Improve apon betterdesktop. The site is a collection of usability data with a focus on Linux apps. The front page gives more detail
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
No. All she is "testing" there is how closely the desktop they're being "tested" on resembles the one they're used to.
Novell did this already.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/11
So, to send email
MacOS X != FeeBSD + Aqua
It is a hybrid kernel called XNU which combinines the Mach 3.0 kernel developed at Carnegie Mellon University with COMPONENTS from the FreeBSD kernel. XNU is an acronym for X is Not Unix. Want proof? Many useful UNIX commands WILL NOT WORK in the toyish OS X command line interface (wildcard-while not a command- comes to mind, but theres lots more)
So what GNOME really needs is a means of ramping novice users up to power users. Unfortunately, this is sadly lacking. For instance, let's try navigating in nautilus as a power user:
Open Parent -> Alt+Up
Open Location -> Ctrl+L
Close Parent Folders -> Ctrl+Shift+W
Close All Folders -> Ctrl+Q
Close -> Ctrl+W
Home Folder -> Alt+Home
Notice that we're using Alt key combinations, Ctrl key combinations, and Ctrl+Shift key combinations. My biggest problem with using nautilus effectively is mixing up these combos to either no effect orworse the wrong effect. I usually end up opening a terminal window in frustration after hitting Ctrl+Shift+W rather than Ctrl+W.
I guess my point is that even power users are looking for some consistancy to their interface and GNOME, in focusing on novice users, overlooks this.
I can't comment on how KDE compares in this respect as I've never used it
Your courageous and selfless spelling corrections have made me a better person.
I would add that there are loads of people that use computers every day, but have never learned the basics of the interface they see all the time. I saw someone at work today who, despite doing most of her work in Outlook, and having many folders of e-mail, had no idea that you could collapse and expand the folder tree. If you only learn the tasks as a step-by-step set of actions, and don't learn how to apply those steps to any other tasks, then you really don't know the desktop you use. I think there are a LOT of people that fit this category.