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Instrumented GIMP To Identify Usability Flaws
Mike writes "New users of the GIMP often become frustrated at the application's unwieldy user interface. Now Prof. Michael Terry and a group of researchers at the University of Waterloo have created ingimp, a modified version of the GIMP that collects real-time usability data in order to help the GIMP developers find and fix its usability problems. Terry recently gave a lecture about ingimp and the data it collects. During each session, ingimp records events such as document creation, window manipulation, and tool use. A log of these events is sent to the ingimp server for analysis. The project hopes to answer questions such as 'What is the typical monitor resolution of a GIMP user?' and 'Is the GIMP used primarily for photo editing or drawing?'"
For a while, I actually believed the folks that repeated ad nauseum the mantra that GIMP's user interface was difficult compared to their beloved Photoshop. Then one day I sat down to try to do some quick photo edits on a Photoshop box. Two hours later, I gave up on its bizarre layer model and just installed the GIMP so I could get some work done.
The ease-of-use of a graphic user interface, in general, correlates far more with the user's pre-existing familiarity with the interface than it does with any design decisions of the interface itself. There are certainly areas where GIMP's user interface could be improved, but let's not pretend like it's some kind of embarrassment -- because it's not.
Because involvement in human-subjects research is voluntary, there will always be a self-selection bias. However, we can still estimate the representativeness of the population by understanding the types of people likely to download and install ingimp, and those who are not. If you fall in the latter camp -- you'd never want to use ingimp -- we really want to talk to you. Send us an email at the email address given on the site: http://www.ingimp.org/contact.
In any case, having some data is better than having no data at all. Currently, there is a very active and vibrant group of individuals working on GIMP usability issues (see http://gui.gimp.org/ ). ingimp's data complements this other data to help quantify the ubiquity of behavior/activity/computer hardware setups in the wild.
Michael Terry