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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.'"
I've done a bit of software dev here and there, and I've never had the luxury of being near the users when they first prop it open.
For that reason, I've developed a habit of showing a beta to a nearby co-worker, or a friend, and ask them "Check this out."
And when they say "What is it?" - I haven't done my job right.
We -need- RMS though. Without RMS we just have a bunch of people wanting to get stuff for free. Heck, without RMS and the GPL, Linux would not exist, Linux as in the kernel itself. Chances are it would have been licensed under an obscure license and died due to a non-commercial or other clause. It was only due to the GPL that the kernel was released under a typical license.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I wanted to tell NetworkManager to do something specific (IIRC, use a specific DNS server rather than the one handed out by the DHCP server on my DSL gateway, but it's been a year or so) and couldn't. When I opened a ticket about it, it was closed WONTFIX with the notation that the idea behind it was zero-configuration and adding the ability to configure it to do this was therefore unacceptable.
I want gnome-terminal not to eat my right-clicks. People have been asking for that for *years* and are constantly told that the Gnome developers know better than they do about what they need.
True story here: dad's computer had OpenOffice, not MS Office. My sister's experience with OpenOffice's Impress was terrible: she needed to print all slides from a .ppt file, and couldn't find this option. As she had a tight deadline, and I had nearly zero experience with presentation software anyway, I shrugged and installed MS Office. She ran Powerpoint and found her way very easily.
Just a bit later, I tried to find out how one prints all slides from a presentation.
Guess what? It's done EXACTLY the same way in Impress and Powerpoint. Same function, same name, same location. See, this is not a "Photoshop versus Gimp" style comparison; interface-wise, they were nearly identical (that was before the "ribbon" thing). If she found her way in Powerpoint, she should have found her way in Impress. Yet, she somehow panicked with the new program.
What can a developer do about users that won't even TRY?!
Circumcision is child abuse.
... as a developer.
They basically have labs with one-way mirror. User is left alone in a sound-proof room and given a set of tasks to perform. Everything is recorded (including facial expressions and sound), and any developer can take a look at the test either from the adjacent room or from his/her workstation (using Windows Media Player). The only input the user gets is when he gets so confused he can't accomplish the task from the list. In which case the person conducting the test just says "next task" and that's it.
The experience is really humbling. You just realize that people out there are FAR, FAR less experienced with computers than you thought, and even working their email client is a challenge for most.
You make your assumptions on the basis of what's convenient for you. Guess what, people out there are not you, and what's good for you is torture for them (the inverse is often true, too).
We ended up redesigning the entire chunks of the UI sometimes, some features got cut, some scenarios overhauled. And in the end we still didn't do enough of usability testing (IMO), but such is life in commercial software development - you work against an arbitrary schedule.
It seems reasonable to expect gnome-terminal to pass to ncurses applications all the mouse events described in curs_mouse(3x), including BUTTON3_PRESSED, etc.