Category: GNOME

NotZed, it’s a fact of usability life that some users will always see what they want (or are conditioned) to see, however hard you try to make them see something else. If it’s only 1 in 10 then let them go and use something they think is better for their job… free software is all about choice, right? If it’s 5 in 10, then try to figure out why they’re not seeing what’s obvious to you because you’ve been working on it every day for the past six months.

FWIW, I actually looked at this dialog a good few times before I saw the Username field too– and I knew it must be there or you wouldn’t be annoyed about it My guess is that it’s sometimes being overlooked because the “Server requires authentication” checkbox and the authentication section itself aren’t beside each other. (Paper prototyping is a great way to find out this sort of thing before anything ever hits the screen…)

Experiencing the GUADEC streaming first-hand this year, in conjunction with running across my presentation from GUADEC² in Copenhagen while linking to Anna and Pete’s slides on usability.gnome.org, got me all nostalgic for the videos of that 2001 conference. I guess not all that many people might have seen them, because they don’t live anywhere obvious, the files are huge MPEGs, the filenames are useless, and they’ve never been edited.

Undeterred, I tracked down the video of my 2001 talk, and converted it to ogg/theora for good measure. I converted a couple of others along the way, giving them sensible filenames as I was going, just for the hell of it.

Would anybody be interested in my carrying on this little conversion project, or is 2001 just too much like ancient history now? (Or, indeed, would that be the *best* reason to do it..?)

Jeez, listening to Miguel at GUADEC today you’d think nobody had ever done GNOME usability studies before Sun can’t always publish theirs in full, unfortunately, but we sure file a lot of bugs from them.

Here’s the presentation I gave at Trinity College last Thursday night. Thanks to Marc and Netsoc for asking me, and to Trinity for buying me dinner at Tante Zoe’s afterwards.

Here‘s how Alan thought it went… he assures me that “top usability expert” is only in quotes because that’s what it said in the announcement

I usually go on the defensive when people are quick to slag off Ryanair‘s
customer service– if you’re only willing to shell out a few coppers
for your flight, it’s a bit rich to go looking for compensation or
overnight accommodation if it’s a few hours late or cancelled, or moan
when they charge you for every ounce of overweight baggage. (Fates
which have never befallen me on any of the dozens of Ryanair flights
I’ve taken, I have to say.)

I did find an insidious little addition to their online booking form
last week, though… a “purchase insurance” checkbox, checked by
default, that when unchecked changes your country of residence from
Ireland (or whatever) to Other. ‘Oh, I need to change that back to
Ireland’ you think, only to notice (if you’re lucky) that when you do,
the insurance checkbox is checked again.

Even if you work out that it’s perfectly acceptable to leave the
insurance box unchecked and your country of residence as “other” (you
have to enter it in an unconnected box as part of your address further
down the page anyway), you get another ‘We really think you should
purchase insurance from us’ popup before you’re allowed to continue to
the next page. All rather intimidating really.

For anyone who’s interested, the article I wrote on OSS usability a few months back is now available online (“Meeting the Challenge of Open Source Usability”, starting on page 9).

Alistair Edwards from the University of York Computer Science Department is conducting an interesting little study in the memorability vs. security of passwords– read about it and take part here.