Usability Testing Hardy Heron With a Girlfriend

toomin writes "Reviews of the latest Ubuntu version, 8.04 Hardy Heron, are everywhere, but most of them are undertaken by geeks familiar with Linux. This guy sits his girlfriend down at a brand-new Ubuntu installation and asks her to perform some basic tasks. Some of them are surprisingly easy, others frustrate and annoy. There are lots of little usability tweaks he stumbles upon just by seeing the desktop experience from the point of view of the mainstream user."

Comments

Exceptionally good.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

1) Use internet. Successful.
2) Watch youtube. Unsuccessful. No Flash.
3) Use torrent. Successful (but this is not a novice user task)
4) Draw pic. 1/2 Successful. Chose wrong tool.
5) Burn music. Unsuccessful
6) Mouse speed change. Successful.
7) Theme change. Successful.
8) Desktop background change. Successful.
9) Scree resolution change. Unsuccessful.
10) Advanced image manipulation. Successful
11) MSN. Unsuccessful
12) Install & Use skype. Successful.

Note, the problem with 5) burning music was not the actual burning, but finding the mp3s on a windows partition.

So, 8/12. (maybe 9.5/12)

To be honest, I've seen experience computer users have more trouble doing the above tasks when switching from windows to OS X.

Kudos to Ubuntu.

Re:Exceptionally good.

[Technician]

I'd suggest to you (honestly) - that if all your gf really does is youtube, mail & chat, then she'd be much better off on Ubuntu than windows.

Maybe. Those who use a computer for those tasks often also use it to play music (MP3 Support) and play movies (DVD support) where Microsoft has paid for the privilage to supply the codecs and the Ubuntu distro is lacking.

MP3 support isn't bad, but DVD support comes with dire warnings of DMCA violations and it may be illegal where you live.

Once installed, I like the Ubuntu machine over anything else for playing movies. You put in the DVD and the movie starts.. No previews, no unskippable FBI warning etc. Nice. If I want to watch all the extras, I can watch them later. It's the way a DVD player should work.

If I travel without a laptop, I carry a copy of Geex box. It's a bootable Linux Media player. Nice.

Re:Smart move

[Cato]

Actually usability testing has been going on with Linux for many years - since at least 2001 for GNOME when Sun started doing this ( http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/usertesting.html ). Here's a good article that talks about usability testing for Linux, also from 2001, and mentioning KDE user testing: http://lwn.net/2001/0614/desktop.php3

GNOME is the way it is today largely because of usability testing, I believe - while many power users and developers whinge about this, it is becoming much closer to Macs in overall usability.

So the issue is not "stupid developers", it's a matter of taking the time to do the testing - and it helps if you have some expertise at running the tests. Then it's the time to actually make the changes. Many developers aren't that interested in doing the testing, which is why there have been separate usability initiatives that can feed changes into projects.

Some of the issues logged here are not that easy to solve - e.g. making Firefox pop up an Ubuntu-specific Flash installation prompt, rather than executing the YouTube JavaScript logic that pushes people towards an Adobe plugin site that actually does have a Linux plugin for Flash, but one that's much harder to install than an Ubuntu-packaged Flash plugin.

Also, the one about finding MP3s on the Windows partition is not that easy - you could simply copy the files across with the Ubuntu migration assistant, but what if they're in a non-standard place? Indexing the Windows filesystem to quickly find these might help, but building the index could take some time. However, it would probably be enough if there was some feature in Ubuntu that scanned for existing partitions and said (based on partition type and a few key directories/files) that 'this looks like a Windows partition, it's available on the desktop through this icon', and ideally did a special symbolic link for the My Documents or similar (though that's tough as it's per-user under Windows - which user should this use).

Usability test

[mach1980]

Well here's some more anectodes:

My wife switched to Ubuntu after her XP-installation trashed the hard drive. When she first tried to recover the OS with the supplied restore-cd from LG neither the WiFi card or sound worked. Then she tried Ubuntu which worked without turning a dial.

Now she's been running Ubuntu for over six months and she's hooked. She even managed to install Hardy Heron while breastfeeding our 7 week old daughter. - If that isn't usability for the masses then what is?

Re:Smart move

[Beardo the Bearded]

Nipples aren't intuitive interfaces. Both moms and babies have to learn how to nurse, and it's an important part of prenatal classes.

If it's not done correctly, you end up with hungry babies and sore moms.