Limiting usability tests to people that have no experience with windows is a pointless waste of time.
Now that's a bold statement.
I happen to have seen several people with zero or almost zero computing experience starting out on Linux. It was a most revealing experience, especially compared to those who started out on windos. I could write an article, but the short is this:
* The Linux people quickly grew accustomed to using the computer as a tool, not a toy * The windos people spent lots of time with wallpapers, themes and other stuff, in the process usually screwing their system up at least once so badly that they needed someone else to rescue them * After a while, the Linux people are quite happy, and have adapted to the KDE/Gnome/whatever-WM quirks * The windos people have also adapted to the windos quirks - but most of them curse the OS. Quite a lot. * The Linux people end up fairly happy. The only reason I have ever heard from a Linux user who started out that way to switch to or dual-boot into windos is that (s)he needed certain windos-only software to run and wine didn't cut it. * The windos people don't end up as happy. In fact, most of them sooner or later started bugging me about switching to either Linux or a Mac. Only two seem happy - one is a gamer and the other is an IT guy who knows windos pretty well by now.
YMMV but don't tell anyone that something is a waste of time just because it doesn't follow the Sacred Path of Bill (TM, (R), (C)M$, patent pending).
If you study useability, your goal should be to find out what a good, useable UI is like and not what an UI must be like so that people who are used to some other UI find it somewhat comfortable.
You don't teach people to drive cars by checking out how they ride horses. It's just bullshit science.
It is the invention of DARPA, yes. But 99% of today's Internet was not created by them, it runs on commercial hard- and commercial or Free software, and largely outside the USA. It has become a global network, and it is not the DARPA's pet project anymore.
Funny thing is - the DARPA has acknowledged that for a decade or so. Only the current US administration is a little behind the times, as usual.
It's just difficult to accept that Windows is the best user interface.
Because it isn't. "Adequate", ok. "Fairly good", maybe. "Good", we'd have a disagreement there. "The best", absolutely positively not. It is not the best that exists (OSX beats it hands down and blindfolded) and it is not the best imaginable (just ask any windos user how many times he's cursed it).
It's what people can handle because they're used to it and that's it.
These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want.
So because they are fluent in english, we should do away with french even though it creates the better poems?
Sorry, blindly copying is not improvement. Intelligent copying is not doing everything the same way. Take what works, leave the rest. And the definition of "works" is not "what people are used to". A lot, a huge amount of the things that "work" on windos are actually cludges that people got used to.
Sure, some people are scared when you take the learning wheels from their bikes. But how they enjoy it afterwards!
People go to driving school in order to operate a car, which is a hundred times less complex than a computer.
Mandatory computer learning school, and these problems will disappear. The Internet is quite a lot like a road network with lots of drivers who never properly learned to drive.
Why use people who have experience with windos? It doesn't take a study to realize that they will be trying things - surprise - the way the are used to doing them, i.e. the windos way. As a result, everywhere the choosen Linux UI differs from windos will show up as a "usability issue" when in fact it's not.
Putting people with no computer experience there would be much more enlightening, especially when it comes to finding what things are intuitive and which aren't.
so you can have the system watch for different patterns.
Like someone reading a different e-mail than yesterday?;-)
Sorry, half-joking there. The problem still is that for any somewhat complicated (i.e. real-life) network, there will be a huge volume of different patterns. You end up doing one of two things:
* Spending huge amounts of time setting up the initial patterns and then updating them every time something small changes
* Going to a level of abstraction where attacks can slip through, so you're no better than with the "look for evil bits" approach, except that you spent more time on it all.
Having a dock at the right-hand side of the screen, for example, is a major point for me.
Why? I find it more convenient, and horizontal resolution is higher than vertical, so losing space on the right doesn't hurt as much as losing space at the top or bottom.
Plus there are many notebooks with 16:9 displays on the market already, which makes the ratio even higher.
It's not about eye-candy (I don't care for growing symbols), but about usability. Where the dock is, if it covers the entire space or not, if it can be covered by windows or not - that kind of things.
It wasn't Microsoft's game, it was Bungie's game - M$ acquired Bungie when Halo was mostly done.
And it wasn't a blockbuster. It was successful (mostly because it shipped with the xbox) but a blockbuster? Sorry, not where I live (Germany). After the initial hype, few people spoke about Halo again, and that's not what I call a blockbuster.
Parent got it right. The problem isn't Linux support - Linux is well entrenchend in the movie special effects market that support is pretty mandatory.
The problem is that there are almost no non-Autodesk high-end 3D alternatives left. Another market cornered, another market lost for the customers. A few years down the road, you can be happy with whatever some suit at Autodesk thinks you should be happy with, or you can shove it where the sun don't shine.
And please don't mention Blender. I love Blender to death, but it doesn't play in the same league as Maya. I've used both, and I've also used 3D Max a couple years back. Maya >> 3D Max >> Blender
We have, thanks. What we didn't do is invent a new one.
It's not like the rest of the world is freeriding. Sure, the US pushed the early stages. But much of the current system is a world-wide effort, from infrastructure and hardware to protocols and applications.
It changes a few minor details, yes. But it does not give me an OSX-like dock instead of the taskbar, or a NeXT-like wharf/dock instead of the taskbar. It just sets a theme and a mouse-click behaviour.
Yes, KDE has one major advantage over windos, and that is that it is configurable.
So, you got any strings you can pull in the KDE dev team? Because if you do, I'd like to suggest they ship at least two default setups that one can choose from. Maybe windos-like and OSX-like. And if you want to please me, also NeXT-like.
Taskbar - yes, and a badly abused one, too. Anyone who's working with multiple applications either has it drawn out to 3x the normal size (covering much valuable screen space) or it becomes totally unreadable. What exactly is the task bar for? Showing me what apps are running? Why, thanks, I have a really short memory and always forget what I launched 2 minutes ago. Or for switching between apps? As a matter of fact, alt-tab is much, much more convenient for that, even though it's a pretty crappy way. System tray - that's probably the only useful portion of the taskbar.
Start/K Menu - the abomination. The worst thing ever to hit computer UIs. It sucks so hard, and is so counter-intuitive, that even M$ had to add the animated "press here to start" thing days before Win95 launched, because the final row of testers (who had not been subject to the slow evolution of it all) simply missed it altogether. And when it opens, things become worse. Unsorted crap pile of every dung shit that ever hit the machine. A good portion of the software out there doesn't remove itself properly from it, and the majority of it can not remove itself if you change (i.e. sort, order) its location in the start menu.
And I didn't say "some other desktop is not". I was speaking only about KDE. But yes, Gnome isn't much better. I personally use XFCE4 (it's not perfect, but ok).
You must be using some other windos, or run windos the way it was designed - single tasking. Both on my work NT and my home XP systems explorer is sluggish and sometimes very close to utterly unusable if there is any considerable work being done in the background.
My bash, on the other hand, is always snappy, no matter how red the CPU usage bar is.;-)
And yet the #1 reason lots of other people won't use KDE is because it doesn't work exactly like Windows.
Yes, you have a point there. If you copy something, then any difference to the real thing will be noticed more, the closer you copy. Essentially, you can make a 100% clone, or you can make your own thing, anything inbetween will be perceived as bad.
The way KDE does it, nobody is really happy with it. I figure it's "good enough" for a large share of people, and since many of them are ex-windos users and have grown up to live with "good enough" being all they should ever expect - it kinda works.
5 years ago, there was much hope for the Linux desktop. Today, even I seriously consider buying myself a Mac. And that's after my main machine has been a Linux machine for over 10 years now.
Either way, they can't win.
Learn a lesson from the real leader in computer desktop UI. Copy the Mac or come up with your own alternative. Do things because they are good things and not because windos does them.
Ah crap, I tried convincing the Gnome UI group when it was formed (and I was an early member) and couldn't. Now we have two badly copied windos-like UIs for Linux. And we all pretend to be surprised that it's not making as much progress taking over the desktop world. Hello? You can't overtake anyone if all you ever do is drive slipstream.
that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.
Good! It's about time that they move ahead, and I so hope that they finally abandon the "let's copy everything from windos" meme, which is not a winning strategy. If you want to copy, at least do it from the original (MacOS) and not another already crappy copy (windos).
#1 reason I'm not using KDE: It looks and works like windos, and windos usability is rock bottom.
Verisign will trust anyone that throws enough cash at them.
Which is the proper policy, actually. PKI as-we-know-it (i.e. the certificates in your browser) is not to determine who is trustworthy. Its only purpose is to ensure that the other side is really who it claims to be, i.e. you are really talking to ebay.com and not some phishing site.
How many times do you have to de-funkify the middle management's computers before you have enough evidence that they're part of the problem?
About 212 quadrillion times. Give or take a few billion. The problem isn't in evidence, it's in getting the evidence to someone who can change things.
In my day job, I have almost daily talks with people of the CxO group, and usually once a week with the CEO himself. They do realize what kind of dumbwits they have in their middle management, but they also know that firing them only means replacing the one set of dumbfucks with a different set.
To solve this problem, we will have to come up with an entirely different way of corporate organisation.
I actually wasn't that sarcastic, except for one point:
PKI only verifies the source, not the intent or content. With PKI, I can know for sure that this thing I'm about to install is indeed from XYZ Inc. - but I still don't know if it's trustworthy. The idea is that trust extends - if I trust Mozilla.org then I can install their software and trust that it won't do anything bad. So I can have the browser check the signature and only auto-run stuff that is correctly signed from the browser manufacturer.
That part might actually work. We'll soon see, because many sources are moving into that direction, including Debian.
The management should support you, as you tried it their way.
The problem here is that management is usually part of the problem, not of the solution. Managers are the first to complain against any strong security procedures. Especially middle management relies a lot on the illusion of power, and anything they perceive as taking power away from them is something they will resist with everything they can. Most middle management in most companies requires the illusion of having power because they, in fact, don't have much to speak of.
That would be unauthorized automatic program execution
Which of course brings us to the problem of authorization. We have a PKI infrastructure thanks to Verisign &Co and it's right in the browsers, so that could be used.
Yes, that just might work.
As for non-educated users - they aren't the problem. They're the boundary conditions of our work environment as security people. They will not change. Anyone talking about user-education needs to realize that it's not 1985 anymore, and we've fucking tried it for 20 years. It's not working.
Because knowing that there'll be activity tells you nothing you can turn into cash. "Up or down?" is the question you want answered not "is it moving or not?".
Slashdot Mirror
Limiting usability tests to people that have no experience with windows is a pointless waste of time.
Now that's a bold statement.
I happen to have seen several people with zero or almost zero computing experience starting out on Linux. It was a most revealing experience, especially compared to those who started out on windos. I could write an article, but the short is this:
* The Linux people quickly grew accustomed to using the computer as a tool, not a toy
* The windos people spent lots of time with wallpapers, themes and other stuff, in the process usually screwing their system up at least once so badly that they needed someone else to rescue them
* After a while, the Linux people are quite happy, and have adapted to the KDE/Gnome/whatever-WM quirks
* The windos people have also adapted to the windos quirks - but most of them curse the OS. Quite a lot.
* The Linux people end up fairly happy. The only reason I have ever heard from a Linux user who started out that way to switch to or dual-boot into windos is that (s)he needed certain windos-only software to run and wine didn't cut it.
* The windos people don't end up as happy. In fact, most of them sooner or later started bugging me about switching to either Linux or a Mac. Only two seem happy - one is a gamer and the other is an IT guy who knows windos pretty well by now.
YMMV but don't tell anyone that something is a waste of time just because it doesn't follow the Sacred Path of Bill (TM, (R), (C)M$, patent pending).
You missed the point entirely.
If you study useability, your goal should be to find out what a good, useable UI is like and not what an UI must be like so that people who are used to some other UI find it somewhat comfortable.
You don't teach people to drive cars by checking out how they ride horses. It's just bullshit science.
The internet is a creation of the US military
No, it ain't.
It is the invention of DARPA, yes. But 99% of today's Internet was not created by them, it runs on commercial hard- and commercial or Free software, and largely outside the USA. It has become a global network, and it is not the DARPA's pet project anymore.
Funny thing is - the DARPA has acknowledged that for a decade or so. Only the current US administration is a little behind the times, as usual.
It's just difficult to accept that Windows is the best user interface.
Because it isn't.
"Adequate", ok. "Fairly good", maybe. "Good", we'd have a disagreement there. "The best", absolutely positively not. It is not the best that exists (OSX beats it hands down and blindfolded) and it is not the best imaginable (just ask any windos user how many times he's cursed it).
It's what people can handle because they're used to it and that's it.
These people aren't stupid losers- they are fluent in another operating system, where they can achieve whatever it is they want.
So because they are fluent in english, we should do away with french even though it creates the better poems?
Sorry, blindly copying is not improvement. Intelligent copying is not doing everything the same way. Take what works, leave the rest. And the definition of "works" is not "what people are used to". A lot, a huge amount of the things that "work" on windos are actually cludges that people got used to.
Sure, some people are scared when you take the learning wheels from their bikes. But how they enjoy it afterwards!
People go to driving school in order to operate a car, which is a hundred times less complex than a computer.
Mandatory computer learning school, and these problems will disappear. The Internet is quite a lot like a road network with lots of drivers who never properly learned to drive.
Why use people who have experience with windos? It doesn't take a study to realize that they will be trying things - surprise - the way the are used to doing them, i.e. the windos way. As a result, everywhere the choosen Linux UI differs from windos will show up as a "usability issue" when in fact it's not.
Putting people with no computer experience there would be much more enlightening, especially when it comes to finding what things are intuitive and which aren't.
so you can have the system watch for different patterns.
;-)
Like someone reading a different e-mail than yesterday?
Sorry, half-joking there. The problem still is that for any somewhat complicated (i.e. real-life) network, there will be a huge volume of different patterns. You end up doing one of two things:
* Spending huge amounts of time setting up the initial patterns and then updating them every time something small changes
* Going to a level of abstraction where attacks can slip through, so you're no better than with the "look for evil bits" approach, except that you spent more time on it all.
Having a dock at the right-hand side of the screen, for example, is a major point for me.
Why? I find it more convenient, and horizontal resolution is higher than vertical, so losing space on the right doesn't hurt as much as losing space at the top or bottom.
Plus there are many notebooks with 16:9 displays on the market already, which makes the ratio even higher.
It's not about eye-candy (I don't care for growing symbols), but about usability. Where the dock is, if it covers the entire space or not, if it can be covered by windows or not - that kind of things.
It wasn't Microsoft's game, it was Bungie's game - M$ acquired Bungie when Halo was mostly done.
And it wasn't a blockbuster. It was successful (mostly because it shipped with the xbox) but a blockbuster? Sorry, not where I live (Germany). After the initial hype, few people spoke about Halo again, and that's not what I call a blockbuster.
Parent got it right. The problem isn't Linux support - Linux is well entrenchend in the movie special effects market that support is pretty mandatory.
The problem is that there are almost no non-Autodesk high-end 3D alternatives left. Another market cornered, another market lost for the customers. A few years down the road, you can be happy with whatever some suit at Autodesk thinks you should be happy with, or you can shove it where the sun don't shine.
And please don't mention Blender. I love Blender to death, but it doesn't play in the same league as Maya. I've used both, and I've also used 3D Max a couple years back. Maya >> 3D Max >> Blender
We have, thanks. What we didn't do is invent a new one.
It's not like the rest of the world is freeriding. Sure, the US pushed the early stages. But much of the current system is a world-wide effort, from infrastructure and hardware to protocols and applications.
It changes a few minor details, yes. But it does not give me an OSX-like dock instead of the taskbar, or a NeXT-like wharf/dock instead of the taskbar. It just sets a theme and a mouse-click behaviour.
That's a far cry from what I've asked for.
Good point there.
Yes, KDE has one major advantage over windos, and that is that it is configurable.
So, you got any strings you can pull in the KDE dev team? Because if you do, I'd like to suggest they ship at least two default setups that one can choose from. Maybe windos-like and OSX-like. And if you want to please me, also NeXT-like.
You're an idiot
,)
But at least I have some humour and know what a smiley is.
Let's see...
Taskbar - yes, and a badly abused one, too. Anyone who's working with multiple applications either has it drawn out to 3x the normal size (covering much valuable screen space) or it becomes totally unreadable.
What exactly is the task bar for? Showing me what apps are running? Why, thanks, I have a really short memory and always forget what I launched 2 minutes ago. Or for switching between apps? As a matter of fact, alt-tab is much, much more convenient for that, even though it's a pretty crappy way.
System tray - that's probably the only useful portion of the taskbar.
Start/K Menu - the abomination. The worst thing ever to hit computer UIs. It sucks so hard, and is so counter-intuitive, that even M$ had to add the animated "press here to start" thing days before Win95 launched, because the final row of testers (who had not been subject to the slow evolution of it all) simply missed it altogether.
And when it opens, things become worse. Unsorted crap pile of every dung shit that ever hit the machine. A good portion of the software out there doesn't remove itself properly from it, and the majority of it can not remove itself if you change (i.e. sort, order) its location in the start menu.
And I didn't say "some other desktop is not". I was speaking only about KDE. But yes, Gnome isn't much better. I personally use XFCE4 (it's not perfect, but ok).
It *reacts* quickly, thats a crucial point.
;-)
You must be using some other windos, or run windos the way it was designed - single tasking. Both on my work NT and my home XP systems explorer is sluggish and sometimes very close to utterly unusable if there is any considerable work being done in the background.
My bash, on the other hand, is always snappy, no matter how red the CPU usage bar is.
And yet the #1 reason lots of other people won't use KDE is because it doesn't work exactly like Windows.
Yes, you have a point there. If you copy something, then any difference to the real thing will be noticed more, the closer you copy. Essentially, you can make a 100% clone, or you can make your own thing, anything inbetween will be perceived as bad.
The way KDE does it, nobody is really happy with it. I figure it's "good enough" for a large share of people, and since many of them are ex-windos users and have grown up to live with "good enough" being all they should ever expect - it kinda works.
5 years ago, there was much hope for the Linux desktop. Today, even I seriously consider buying myself a Mac. And that's after my main machine has been a Linux machine for over 10 years now.
Either way, they can't win.
Learn a lesson from the real leader in computer desktop UI. Copy the Mac or come up with your own alternative. Do things because they are good things and not because windos does them.
Ah crap, I tried convincing the Gnome UI group when it was formed (and I was an early member) and couldn't. Now we have two badly copied windos-like UIs for Linux. And we all pretend to be surprised that it's not making as much progress taking over the desktop world.
Hello? You can't overtake anyone if all you ever do is drive slipstream.
that could radically change how the world's most popular free desktop looks and works.
Good! It's about time that they move ahead, and I so hope that they finally abandon the "let's copy everything from windos" meme, which is not a winning strategy. If you want to copy, at least do it from the original (MacOS) and not another already crappy copy (windos).
#1 reason I'm not using KDE: It looks and works like windos, and windos usability is rock bottom.
Verisign will trust anyone that throws enough cash at them.
Which is the proper policy, actually. PKI as-we-know-it (i.e. the certificates in your browser) is not to determine who is trustworthy. Its only purpose is to ensure that the other side is really who it claims to be, i.e. you are really talking to ebay.com and not some phishing site.
How many times do you have to de-funkify the middle management's computers before you have enough evidence that they're part of the problem?
About 212 quadrillion times. Give or take a few billion. The problem isn't in evidence, it's in getting the evidence to someone who can change things.
In my day job, I have almost daily talks with people of the CxO group, and usually once a week with the CEO himself. They do realize what kind of dumbwits they have in their middle management, but they also know that firing them only means replacing the one set of dumbfucks with a different set.
To solve this problem, we will have to come up with an entirely different way of corporate organisation.
I actually wasn't that sarcastic, except for one point:
PKI only verifies the source, not the intent or content. With PKI, I can know for sure that this thing I'm about to install is indeed from XYZ Inc. - but I still don't know if it's trustworthy.
The idea is that trust extends - if I trust Mozilla.org then I can install their software and trust that it won't do anything bad. So I can have the browser check the signature and only auto-run stuff that is correctly signed from the browser manufacturer.
That part might actually work. We'll soon see, because many sources are moving into that direction, including Debian.
The management should support you, as you tried it their way.
The problem here is that management is usually part of the problem, not of the solution. Managers are the first to complain against any strong security procedures. Especially middle management relies a lot on the illusion of power, and anything they perceive as taking power away from them is something they will resist with everything they can. Most middle management in most companies requires the illusion of having power because they, in fact, don't have much to speak of.
That would be unauthorized automatic program execution
Which of course brings us to the problem of authorization. We have a PKI infrastructure thanks to Verisign &Co and it's right in the browsers, so that could be used.
Yes, that just might work.
As for non-educated users - they aren't the problem. They're the boundary conditions of our work environment as security people. They will not change. Anyone talking about user-education needs to realize that it's not 1985 anymore, and we've fucking tried it for 20 years. It's not working.
And here I was, thinking that automatic program execution without end-user involvement was the #1 security problem of our days...
because the end-user who's not the average slashdotter won't know there's a patch and won't install it.
That's why they added the red icon, auto-update and the other stuff. Uh, back in 2003 or so.
Interesting, I didn't know that. But it's been over 10 years since I worked at the exchange.
Got a name or a source where I can read that up?
Because knowing that there'll be activity tells you nothing you can turn into cash. "Up or down?" is the question you want answered not "is it moving or not?".