On 15/11/07 22:55, Patrick wrote: > Has Canonical carried out studies with new users of different technical > abilities? This might be a good thing to do. After a Newbie installs > Ubuntu where do they go first? How is their experience in the first > hour. To woe Windows users I think the first hour or so needs to be > entirely painless. >
The studies you're describing are usability studies and a recent posting on this list started discussing how to notify users about how to install non-Ubuntu software and how to interact with them. That discussion as well as this one indicate that there is scope for a lot of work in this field. I'm sure that some work has been done, though I suspect it was conducted within the Gnome / KDE realm, rather than within a distribution. I've not yet had time to look further into this, though it's on my to-do list. I'm pointing this out because I'm (or was :) an Interactive Multi-Media developer (that is when the term was coined in the early 1990's and scripting was done with Hypercard and later Supercard) from way back. As a member of a leading team at the time we did research on how to interact with the user and how to get their attention - short outcome, it's hard :) When I have a spare moment I'll go back to my old documents and colleagues and see what I can dig up. I agree that a user experience of a computer needs to be entirely painless, but as an industry we're currently heading in the opposite direction, that is more and more complexity. In the time that Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines were the bible of how to interact with a user - before it was Embraced and Extended by Microsoft, one of the best comments I remember was: "If the program can figure out what the answer to a question is, or if the information already exists, or if the question has already been asked, don't bother the user with it." The post-install scripts follow this reasoning pretty much, though I'm fuzzy on how it's implemented for most packages. Whether or not any of the above will actually woe a Windows user is a whole different discussion :) Cheers, -- Onno Benschop Connected via Optus B3 at S31°54'06" - E115°50'39" (Yokine, WA) -- ()/)/)() ..ASCII for Onno.. |>>? ..EBCDIC for Onno.. --- -. -. --- ..Morse for Onno.. ITmaze - ABN: 56 178 057 063 - ph: 04 1219 8888 - [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list Ubuntu-devel-discuss@lists.ubuntu.com Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
