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Shuttleworth Suggests 1-Way Valve For User Experience Testing
darthcamaro writes "No surprise but Ubuntu's Mark Shuttleworth has come out swinging in favor of the Linux desktop. Speaking at Linuxcon yesterday he detailed the things that he thinks Linux requires in order to win the desktop wars. Those include: co-ordinated software releases, better quality and design, some user experience testing and oh yeah, a dose of 'shut the f*** up' too. During his keynote, he extended an invitation to any open source application to submit their software for testing by user-experience experts. The sessions would be recorded for posterity, and the developer would not be able to interact with the user. "'If the developer is in the room, they have to say nothing. It's the shut the f*** up protocol,' Shuttleworth said. 'You sit and watch someone struggle with the software that you've so lovingly produced.'"
Users always ruin the best software.
He knows what he's talking about. We don't need more RMS but more people like Shuttleworth. Pragmatically minded, not focused only on ideals. If somebody wants follow only ideas I suggest Green Peace or monastery.
"an experienced, industrious, ambitious, and often, quite often, picturesque liar" - Mark Twain
The problem is, we have this odd expectation that any software, from a compiler, to a game, to an office suite to a browser should be instinctive by use of other software. That is, they think Word processor == Word. So when you take another word processor such as Open Office, they expect it to work -exactly- like Word. Any differences are seen as "faults". Take someone fully new to computers and have them learn Linux or Windows and chances are they will figure out Linux faster. Take someone who has used Windows all their life and give them Linux they complain because things aren't exactly the same.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Because so many developers develop Open Source applications for personal satisfaction, they tend to focus on scratching their own itches.
A characteristic of usability testing is that your goal is to scratch the itch of your customers; your preferences have very little significance in the context of the test.
It doesn't take a genius to see a potential conflict in the two goals; on the other hand, a developer likes to see his code in actual use by actual human beings. To maximize this use, a developer must at least pay lip service to documentation and UI testing.
Many developers never make this conceptual leap, however.
"Man is nothing without the works of man" -- Helvetius
This is a good point - if software doesn't explain itself, then it is broken. I believe this holds all the way from the top level to the basics. If the architecture of the system isn't well signposted and comprehensible, it fails. If an icon meaning is murky and there are no tooltips, it fails. Now you always have to assume some basic level competence on the part of the user (eg. knowing to type man to get program info, or knowing how to click with a mouse) but once you're part that, there is no reason why programs can't be self-explanatory, or at the very least self-documenting. I don't know how many times I've torn my hair out because the 'Help' menu's only item was "About".
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I would love for the Gnome developers to sit in on that session.
And then be beaten with sledgehammers until they understand that the goal should not be 'unconfigurable' but 'no configuration needed 90% of the time, and configurable the remaining 10% of the time'.
Desktop, workstation and server OS are obsolete ideas. In 20 years we probably won't even have these things or at least not worry about them. I can't say for certain what will replace the desktop, but I think it is going away in our lifetimes. Or perhaps we'll just have one platform that runs the same OS and same applications on our laptops, servers and phones.
They've been predicting the death of the desktop and a return to centralized computing for 20 years.
"Frequently wrong, never in doubt."
Your fears are unfounded. If they were valid, we wouldn't have GNOME & KDE & the hundreds of other desktop environments and window managers.
In fact, this will make things even better. KDE will still be KDE, but it will be more usable. Same with GNOME. Some of the more esoteric systems will not change, because they aren't aimed at regular people.
There is no single Linux OS that can be bettered/ruined by a single person. There are literally *hundreds* of Linux OSs. And even if there were just one single Linux OS, how can you argue *against* usability testing? If there's just one OS, and it goes through testing, it will almost certainly be made better, but if you *don't* test, it will still be the single Linux OS that everyone has to use, it just won't be as good.
My biggest complaint about Linux on the desktop is the lack of a true universal UI
Not much of a problem though, for most people, Linux isn't Linux but a Linux distro, that is if you have Ubuntu, you get GNOME, if you have Kubuntu you get KDE. Similar to how you can either get Windows XP or Windows Vista/7 with different UIs.
and the difficulty in user software (a user should be able to run every application without tweaking text files)
Most user-level applications don't require you to tweak text files unless you need some obscure setting. A few "pro" level applications (as in, your going to be programming or know something about computers) use text files because they are easier to edit, debug and generally give support for a knowledgeable user.
and ease of administration
Compared to Windows, Linux administration is a breeze. A Linux system ran by a normal user who doesn't screw around as root, will remain stable. Simply going to a site can get you a virus in Windows. Because of this and the -large- amount of viruses on Windows, it is pretty much required to run a virus scan pretty often. With Linux, even if you are running a vulnerable everything, chances are you simply won't get a virus.
Plus, with Windows update you never know what you are going to get, "features" constantly creep in (remember the search bar that was a "critical update"?) and large changes are considered updates. It takes a lot more work administrating a small amount of Windows boxes compared to Linux.
When it achieves the same level or better of intuitiveness as Windows, then it can compete.
Windows has not intuitiveness. The only reason why we think it has is because most people have been using it for 20 some odd years. A lot of the Windows conventions have been -proven- to be counter intuitive and plain confusing (anyone else wonder why Add/Remove programs is called that even though you really can't add in any programs from there). Windows is terribly unfriendly, we just have gotten used to it.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
The idea that an interface can be entirely judged by how well a user handles it in the first few minutes of exposure is, in my opinion, one of the bigger *problems* with UI design of late. A quality interface should both be immediately accessible, and SCALE WELL TO MORE ADVANCED USE CASES. In my experience, Gnome, OS X, and the bundled native applications that come with each currently fail miserably at the latter. The former head of Apple's UI team makes a pretty good case for this being a problem here, although the article focuses specifically on a facet of the OS X design philosophy which causes scalability issues, rather than the problem in general. To borrow a line from the article: "The beginner today will be the expert of tomorrow. The user with 200 photos today will be the user with 2000 a year from now. The user with 10 songs today will be the user with 100 songs six months from now. The user with one or two extra apps on the iPhone will be the user with 100 apps three months from now."
"Windows has not intuitiveness. The only reason why we think it has is because most people have been using it for 20 some odd years."
Exactly. Those old exclusivity agreements that MS insisted on are still paying off. People are used to MS, and anything different is "wrong".
Not to mention - Dell, Compaq, and other OEMS basically did all of MS hardware compatibility for them. Linux is still struggling to make some hardware work that was "designed for Windows".
Just a few years of unfair advantage can translate into decades of revenues.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It is 100% worthless.
I have a job to do, it involves many facets. I need to be able to do all of them. It isn't an option to say "No I am not going to do this part of my job." Well, my Windows system does 100% of what I need. It runs all the different kinds of software I need to do the various parts of my job. Ok, great. Now if Linux doesn't, it is worthless. Why? Because there's no point in running a different OS, if I still have to have Windows. If Linux does 80% of what I need, and Windows does 100%, then I might as well always be booted in to Windows. Why would I boot to a different OS, if it can't do everything?
Also, in terms of switching, it isn't good enough to say "You can do everything you need." It most certainly isn't worth a switch if you can do everything you need, but it is harder or more complicated to do. It isn't even good enough to say "You can do everything you need just as easy." Even if everything works as smooth as it does with what you currently have, it isn't worth switching because there's no advantage.
To be worth switching, you have to show how things are going to be BETTER. You have to show that you can do 100% of your job, and that it'll be better. Otherwise, it really isn't worth it.
I think that is part of the problem that often when people say "Well you can do what you need to do in Linux," they haven't really looked at what the person does. What the truth can be is "You can technically do what you need to do, but it'll be a whole lot of work, a good deal of retraining, and not nearly as smooth as what you have now."
Go do volunteer basic computer literacy session for your local senior center. Don't try to convert them to linux or get them using Firefox or anything dumb like that. Just ask what their problems are, and how you can help. You will quickly understand how broken and unintuitive computer software is.
You're confusing two very different things. "Pay attention to the user's behavior" and "listen to what the user asks for".
The first is always valuable. Seeing what users do is just plain good. You should be doing that. You should absolutely be doing that.
The second, however, is a frequent mistake. Users don't know what they want. They know what they want to do, and they either know they can't do it or they know how they used to be able to do it, but the ideas they come up with to fix that issue tend to range the gamut from "barely acceptable" to "horrible".
Any change you make to an existing UI - *any change whatsoever* - will result in a storm of people calling for blood. No matter how good the idea is, no matter how good the change is, people will scream for it to be changed back. If you want to create a good UI, at some point you just have to ignore this. People yell for reversion, you tell them "no", and a few months down the line you find out if you made the right call or not.
You might think he made the wrong decision here, but "listening to the users" has absolutely nothing to do with real user experience testing.
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The two really aren't the same thing, they only seem that way because you've erroneously over-simplified his position to "listen to the users."
User experience testing is essentially about usability. If you put some dude who has never seen your software in front of it, can he use it to get his work done? Is there anything seriously impeding his ability to 1) learn or 2) use the software?
What you're referencing is that something changed and people don't like the change. For starters, most people don't like change even if it is ultimately change for the better. More to the point though, it has nothing to do with learning or using a piece of software. They simply preferred one behavior to another for a set of reasons that may or may not address any of the reasons the change was ultimately made. A user below suggested that the previous situation (apparently, an icon in the dock for updates) was terribly ineffective but that the new system now achieves much higher update rates. In a situation like that, where some users are annoyed by a behavior but there is a demonstrable and measurable net positive to the change, reverting it is probably the wrong answer even if his motto was "listen to the users."
For what it's worth, as somebody who has no vested interest in the change either way I think his response was perfectly reasonable.
Was it overwhelming public opinion? Sorry if I'm wrong in my assumptions, but I smell some bias in your post. It seems to me like you were one of the ones who want the change reverted. There's nothing wrong with that, but combine selection bias with the general megaphone that negative reactions get compared to positive ones (far more people hop on to review something they hated than loved) and I don't know it's as clear-cut as you suggest. Plus, this is a bugtracker. For all the increased likelihood of bad comments to good in general, most people wouldn't even think to log onto a bug tracker if they liked or accepted the new behavior. And why should they?
It's also worth mentioning that "listen to your users" wouldn't necessarily equate with "give your users everything they want" as well.
I always get asked, "How did you get good with computers?" To which I reply, "I was just able to read."
Well, the computer industry is slowly learning how to deal with people like you. More and more, they are implementing the "no documentation at all" standard. In the near future, it won't matter that you know how to read, because there will be no document anywhere for anything.
Actually, for Microsoft and Apple stuff, they're pretty much there now. Most of their new stuff has no written documentation at all. Their one remaining problem is that there are online forums where people actually write about such things, and google can quickly find them for you. But MS and Apple are working on ways of confounding that approach.
So soon you'll have no choice but to ask around to find out how to do something. If you do this via email or IM, your message will be hidden from others, so they won't be able to read the results.
I just wasted a number of hours trying to help a friend figure out how to deal with an incomprehensible Vista error message that makes logins totally fail. There are several thousand questions about the specific message online, and it appears that several hundred people have managed to fix it. But so far, none of the discussions we've found actually say what they did to fix it. So we've apparently hit a brick wall, despite all the bandwidth taken up by discussions of this particular problem. This illustrates how the MS community is learning to hobble those who can read, and ensure that there is nothing useful online on the topic.
Lessee; do I need a ;-) here?
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