Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) [LWN.net]

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 17, 2012 16:26 UTC (Fri) by flacoste (guest, #62513)
In reply to: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) by Cyberax
Parent article: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

> Maybe they need to actually listen more to actual users,
> not only to interface designers.

Unity is probably the Linux user interface that takes input the most from users. Except that it doesn't do it by taking into account what people comments on blogs or bug reports, but by doing actual user testing. That's taking people in, putting them in front of the computer and asking them to complete regular tasks. And then observing what they do and what they say. That's how you actually build good user interface.

For those interested in how that works, I suggest reading Charline's posts like http://design.canonical.com/2011/04/unity-benchmark-usabi... or http://design.canonical.com/2010/11/usability-testing-of-...

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Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 17, 2012 19:15 UTC (Fri) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (2 responses)

"Of the 15 participants recruited, 13 were Windows users, 1 was a Mac user, and 1 used both Windows and Mac. None of the participants was familiar with Ubuntu."

15 participants is far too little to be used as the only source of feedback, and no Linux users were invited, which is a huge problem considering that most users of the next version of Ubuntu are likely to be simply users of the last one who upgrade.

Plus, it seems they also didn't specifically invite programmers, which are also a core group of people to please (since they help you write the software and advertise it).

"During one-on-one sessions, Unity was presented on a netbook"

Uh?
Surely they should test an interface on a proper desktop computer as well, no?

And perhaps also a tablet and a mobile phone.

However doing this is a good idea, and they did get interesting feedback, albeit only from the perspective of mostly clueless users.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 17, 2012 20:54 UTC (Fri) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (1 responses)

The Linux human-computer interfaces I have met (even the ones I like) have a nasty tendency to feel like they are created by people who have zero-or-negative concern for whether the systems they create are usable by anyone who isn't already-clueful or actively clueseeking.

Clueful and clueless

Posted Feb 18, 2012 10:18 UTC (Sat) by man_ls (guest, #15091) [Link]

But, is that a bad thing? You might say that this kind of attitude encourages clueseeking and empowers users. I do dislike interfaces which are not friendly to users who are already clueful (or actively clueseeking, as you eloquently put it). Interfaces friendly to the clueful are also better in the long run, since all users tends to be familiar with the software: everyone wins.

Another classic question is whether an interface good for clueful users can also be adapted to welcome clueless users without dumbing it down. That is what Apple supposedly does well -- some commenters on LWN don't seem to agree, but Mac OS X users are quite happy with it. I am not sure how it fares with newcomers these days, though at least we know that at some remote point in the past Apple engineers cared about that.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 12:13 UTC (Mon) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (1 responses)

Canonical is not the first to conduct usability studies. There are initiatives like http://www.openusability.org who did such tests as far back as 2003. Or Novell's Better Desktop initiative.

So I would be a bit more careful with such statements.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 20, 2012 20:22 UTC (Mon) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Sun did their first usability tests of GNOME in 1999, I believe, though those results are now missing from the web.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 21, 2012 6:30 UTC (Tue) by blujay (guest, #39961) [Link] (1 responses)

That depends on your definition of a "good" UI. What's suitable and "intuitive" (that word...) for someone who's never used a computer before, or who's only used one UI in his whole life, will not be the most suitable for a veteran user who doesn't need his hand held all along the way. "Wizards" are great for people who don't know how to use a computer--but they're absolutely detestable to other users.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 21, 2012 10:41 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link]

Today, there are too many software systems for anyone to be an expert in all of them. If learning to manually configure a given software system to do what I want takes an hour, manually configuring it to do that thing takes 20 seconds, and it comes with a wizard that lets me create a configuration that does what I want in 15 seconds, it will never pay off for me to learn how to manually configure it until I want to do something outside the scope of the wizard - and even then it might be saner to take the output of the wizard and tweak it rather than hand-rolling a configuration from scratch.

Thus, as long as it is feasible to manually configure the system, having "wizards" to automate configuration for common use cases is actively beneficial; it allows me to concentrate on learning the intricacies of the software systems I do want to do exotic things with, rather than having to learn the intricacies of every software system I use.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 23, 2012 16:10 UTC (Thu) by vonbrand (guest, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

I beg to differ. That is the way to design an interface that an user will learn to use in the short while that the test takes, it won't necessarily lead to an interface that is efficient to use by a knowledgeable user.

Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

Posted Feb 23, 2012 18:39 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

Exactly

When learning to ride a bicycle, having training wheels really helps.

However if you then conclude that training wheels are so useful that they should be formed into the frame of the bike instead of as a bolt-on option (after all, adults can get hacksaws and other tools to cut the frame if they _really_ think they are expert enough to not need them), it ends up crippling the long-term use of the bike.