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Conducting a Unix Desktop Usability Study?

Posted by Cliff on from the not-something-you'd-generally-find-in-the-HOWTO-db dept.

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."

2 of 313 comments (clear)

  1. Re:My advice? by cyclop · · Score: 3, Informative

    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 /. comments with a sig attached to the end.
  2. Re:Tainted vs Ignorant users. by Jon-o · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.