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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."
A Linux geek with a girlfriend?? Yeah right!
Something is surely wrong, when instead of fscking her right proper he sits her down with Ubuntu...
This is Slashdot, not PenthouseDot or PlayboyDot.
We don't have girlfriends to test the usability of our hardon's with.
Oh... Hardy Herron, who's that ?
That's how user testing should be done. It is really much too difficult for someone familiar with the program or OS to see what is not obvious or confusing to a novice user. The people that program the UI don't always think like a user - they usually think like a programmer, and that doesn't always work.
In other news, man tests usability of Duke Nukem Forever running on GNU Hurd by making his GIRLFRIEND play it.
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.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
This is slashdot! I don't have a girlfriend, you insensitive clod!
I laughed heartily at the fact that a common user scenario includes how to torrent a Spice Girls album. Not that I think that's not the case; it was just pretty refreshing to see how blatant this guy is about it.
Where do I get this "with a girlfriend" release? .. of course with my luck, the "girlfriend" will be the openbsd version, and ship with all ports closed by default.
Find Japanese addresses in English on Google Maps Japan: http://diddlefinger.com/
That's pretty interesting. On a tangentially related note, a guy I work with just install Ubuntu as his first linux. A friend and I were talking about 8.04 and he overheard us, so he walked up and started asking questions about it which we answered. The next day he shows up to work and says that he installed it and is really liking it. What is this world coming to when a normal guy one day hears about linux and the next successfully installs it without asking the local nerds for help? It was really interesting, he said the hardest thing was burning the ISO, other than that he said it was easier to use and set up than windows. Trust me when I say that this guy is very very average when it comes to computer smarts, this was a huge leap for him and it was no trouble at all. That's how I know linux is heading mainstream.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
And most people would rather stay with XP instead of moving to Vista. Just like they'd rather stay with XP than moving to Ubuntu.
I'd like to see the same test with Kubuntu. Not saying that it's better but I'd like to see the results with KDE as well.
The article several times suggests that the solution to some of these problems is, essentially, user education: having balloons that signal "new item installed" or wizards open the first time you launch a program, telling you how the program works.
The problem is that this approach often doesn't work. For one thing, it annoys the piss out of experience users. For another thing, new users tend to ignore most of that information... mainly because they are being overwhelmed by new information and can't possibly assimilate it all.
Take, for instance, the problem that was encountered when changing screen resolution. The tester changed the resolution easily, but then she clicked the "Keep settings" immediately, which locked her into graphic settings that were hard to change back. Part of the problem, I suppose is that the system allowed the user to make a ridiculous change. But part of the problem is also, perhaps, that the user is very used to clicking "OK" on any dialog that gets in the way: there are too many new things to read and learn, and the easiest way to get things done (in the mind of a new user) is to dismiss those annoying boxes as quickly as possible. Would a second popup, that described in detail why this low resolution was a bad idea (and how to undo it when desired), have changed anything? Doubtful. Most users would just click "OK" without reading it.
All this to say that I'm by no means convinced that adding more balloons, wizards, and dialog boxes will magically make it easier for users to figure out what's going on. I don't know what the solution is: usability is a tough problem. There is a place for helpful information (balloons, tool-tips, etc.), reminders, and wizards. But too much of this becomes decidedly counter-productive.
At least in Linux you could boot up into command line mode and edit your xorg.conf file to change the resolution. Say what you want about the command line and editing the config file, and how users shouldn't have to do it, but at least the option is available. Any idea if the same can be done under windows? It's the same reason why so many forums are filled with directions on how to accomplish stuff over the command line. Sure it's a little more difficult than clicking around in a GUI. But it's much more likely to work across different distros and different versions of the same distro.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Hi... I'm a girlfriend of a computer geek? Anyway, he helped me get set up on Ubuntu. If you have a girlfriend, show her how to use Ubuntu. Please! Don't leave her stranded on Windoze. Sure, there's a learning curve... but if I didn't have my boyfriend to show me how to get the hang of Ubuntu then I never would have managed it on my own. Just having a computer-savvy guy who could show me the quirks... how to patiently look up fixes on the ubuntu forums rather than sitting here mad at the machine if something breaks... damn that's sexy. Be prepared for your girlfriend being a little confused/frustrated/annoyed at little things that you just didn't even think to be confused/frustrated/annoyed at when you were setting things up on your machine... but once she gets the hang of it, she won't go back. The number of programs freely available to install immediately is fantastic. I agree that Gimp should be set up more like Photoshop. (I hate how each image gets it's own window. What a window-hog. Also, it needs better colour support.)
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?
Break the sound barrier - bring the noise.
Yeah, and it's a huge part. It's the 800 pound gorilla part.
Testing for useability needs to come in much, much earlier in development, and it needs to involve a much wider cross-section of human beings. And as it's being done, development of adequate documentation and help needs to go hand and hand with it.
It's so easy to disparage girlfriends, the middle-aged, and the elderly--in short, anyone whose job or study is not technical--that I think it's becoming ingrained in the cultures responsible for developing the various operating-system distributions and open-source software packages. This is going to cause them to suffer over the long haul. It's what makes them such a tough sell to people in business.
There's an immense population of middle-aged people, for example, still in the work force. And interestingly enough, they've actually now all got 20 or 25 years' experience as end-users of computer systems. They're not stupid. They all have jobs that they need to get done. They're not interested in being part of user communities and forums. They're not interested in the ideals of free and open-source software. They're not interested in sticking it to Microsoft. They're not interested in that warm feeling of accomplishment that until recently accompanied getting your printers hooked up to OpenOffice--after wasting hours of productive time doing it. They're interested in using their computers as tools to accomplish their current day's work.
Issues of usability and documentation aren't much fun. They're probably the least glamorous and most boring functions of developing the software. That's why they get such short shrift in open-source development. Nobody really wants to take them on, so we're treated to excrescenses like having people guess how to get out to a command line to install their audio player or their scanner or their printer.
Large-scale developers of proprietary software know precisely where their bread is buttered, and they attend to all this as a matter of course.
"Girlfriend" articles seem to appear quite regularly every few months, so at least somebody is thinking about this even at a ridiculous level. A lot more people need to be thinking about it at a much more serious level.
"Here's what's happening. You're starting to drive like your Dad..." - Red Green
I'm sorry, but I'm sick of things like this - his girlfriend HAS to be some untutored user who has no clue about computers, tee-hee. As a female computer programmer, should people assume my husband is computer illiterate? No? Then why assume his girlfriend is?
Isn't it enough to say that the installation was tested with a novice user instead of putting stupid assumptions and implications right in the freaking headline?
And of course, what kind of replies do I expect to my post around here? People marveling that a woman is posting on slashdot that will be modded up as funny. Given the nature of my post, I also expect some responses telling me to calm down or calling me a feminazi. There, I've taken care of those responses, you can stick to ones that actually address what I've said.