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Usability Testing Hardy Heron With a Girlfriend

Posted by kdawson on from the sleeping-on-the-couch-tonight dept.

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."

2 of 846 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Smart move by UbuntuDupe · · Score: -1, Troll

    How hard is it to sit down and run a simple test like the (excellent) one this guy did with his girlfriend for every release? ...Again, there is no logical reason why this hasn't been implemented before. The only explanation is therefore stupidity on the part of the developers The problem is also that when people like me do give you feedback, which shows you the ACTUAL NEWCOMER PERSPECTIVE, we get visciously modded down until we can't even respond.

    And to pre-empt some replies: no, having a Live CD wouldn't help, because the Live CD was the install CD at the time (or so half of them say), so I had bootable media -- I just didn't take 50 unlisted precautions, just several unlisted ones (like trying to confine the install to a secondary hard drive which becomes pointless when it's HIGHLY RECOMMENDED that I install a flaky bootloader even though the hard drive is too big for it).

    How hard can it possibly be to walk through the install process/instructions and check that it at least tells them to take a few precautions so they can be rescued in the case of failure? Notice the guy didn't even *bother* having his girlfriend try the install itself -- you know, the one thing that kept me from becoming a convert and bringing 10 other people with me and giving Linux that much more of a userbase?
    --
    Apology to Ubuntu forum.
  2. Re:Wonderful emphasis by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    The reason people don't like you and why your husband secretly contemplates suicide is because you are a totalitarian.

    Guy posted a story about his girlfriend, who does not use Linux, trying to use Linux. Your response is that of a complete flake.

    If you were less indoctrinated into your feminist hate cult, you would have noticed the myriad of posts here which profess a disbelief in the original story as it requires the readers of slashdot to believe that a Linux user actually has a girlfriend.

    This does address what you've said as the words you wrote were the screeching ravings of a control freak.