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 19:15 UTC (Fri) by slashdot (guest, #22014)
In reply to: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it) by flacoste
Parent article: Lea: The Unity design process (and how you can play a part in it)

"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.

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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.