The definition of "Usability" and how it can be evaluated is an
interesting topic. I'm presenting my thoughts on it (and a little
more) at BAWorld Vancouver at the end of October.
Here's [1] a link to my presentation as it provides a lot more details
than this email does. It's best reviewed in slideshow mode as I have
overlapping text without animations.
Basically though I think the problem here is that we don't have a clear
definition of who our users are. There's tribal knowledge for some that
are involved, but I don't believe there's any actual consensus. I
think this is part of the root of the problem that Shuttleworth
mentioned in his recent presentation - Open Source struggles with
usability in a different way than proprietary. Typically OSS projects
have very specific users in mind during design, and then the results are
used by a lot of people that were originally "out of scope" or who were
not the target audience.
I think Gnome Shell has the potential to experience this problem very
severely and believe we should be doing early usability testing and
analysis - well, too late for early, but we should get started on it asap.
Gnome 3 should have a very broad audience, for obvious reasons. But
that doesn't mean we should design for everyone, as then you run into
the "elastic user" problem.
Do we have a clear definition of Gnome 3's (or even Gnome Shell's)
users, tasks, and context of use? The recent discussion on touch
interfaces, notebooks etc falls into context I believe.
As for design concepts - I think Schneiderman's 8 Golden Rules are a
nice, manageable set (which is different than heuristics). I find them
more applicable and concrete than Nielsen's list (which he created for
web sites I believe) - I give quite a few examples in the presentation.
I'll reply to Brian Cameron's recent post on list, but I wanted to share
my thoughts and presentation on this thread too, as the topic is a very
interesting one for discussion.
If anyone has comments or questions about my presentation, I'd be happy
to respond to them on or off list
Kirk
[email protected]
[1]
http://thebside.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/Kirk-Bridger-Eliminating-The-Odd-submitted.odp
Rick Spencer wrote:
I agree with Stormy. It's not an "either/or" discussion. New users and frequent
users should both like the system.
Probably the easiest way to get a list of what usability is "about", is to
start with Jakob Nielsen's list of heuristics for his heuristic review method. This stuff
has stood the test of time.
The "power user" heuristic is:
Flexibility and efficiency of use -
Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction
for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and
experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions.
wikipedia has a good write up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation
--- On Thu, 10/1/09, Stormy Peters <[email protected]> wrote:
From: Stormy Peters <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: [Usability] Requesting a right-click root menu for GNOME 3
To: "Karoliina Salminen" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Anzan Hoshin Roshi" <[email protected]>, [email protected]
Date: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 7:39 AM
Usability is not just about making
things easy for novice users. It's about making an
intuitive interface for people - all people.
My understanding is that many of the difficulties arise
in the trade offs between the types of users.
Stormy
On Sep 30, 2009 11:36 PM,
"Karoliina Salminen" <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 5:30 PM,
Anzan Hoshin Roshi
<[email protected]>
wrote:
Hello,
...Hi,
Can you explain how is this power user feature is related
to usability?
You apparently are not a representative of normal users at
all.
Normal users don't know key shortcuts and right click
configurable
this and that,
they want a plain, simple, slick and cool user interface
they can click, pan,
maybe zoom, etc. These right click main menu (like it
appeared
originally already
on fvwm when I was a kid) schemes are so 80s to be
sincere.
It is a good idea to support power user features, but
design should never be
built around the power user features because that is not
usability for
normal users,
that is fast way to work for very advanced users, maybe
0.01% of the users.
Best Regards,
Karoliina Salminen
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