Category: Usability

An interesting defection indeed.

So, I guess 2.12 is the first major GNOME release in a long time where we’ve really made no attempt at any sort of UI review. Either this means we don’t need them any more, which would be great, or we (the GUP team) just suck granite pebbles for not getting around to it this time :/

Actually, I occasionally find the IE feature to which Havoc refers vaguely useful… he’s right that it never opens the page you want to go to next, but particularly if it’s a portal, it might well contain a link to one that you do¹, and it’s harmless enough if it doesn’t, provided the page load is quickly interruptible. Admittedly you could just Shift-Click the link in the original window to achieve the same effect, but I usually find shortcuts more convenient than modified clicks.

It also reinforces the fact that your browsing history has been carried forward from the previous window– a trick that Firefox would do well to learn.

¹The Macintosh version of IE made portal browsing even easier by providing a Page Holder tab in its sidebar that could hold all the links on a page for you, so you didn’t have to keep navigating back and forward… would be nice to see something like that in some other browsers too.

Eew, just updated my Breezy box and was confronted with this unhappy sight when I tried to add a new applet to my panel:

Don’t do it, I beg you 🙂 I presume it’s early work in progress, but it always seems so much harder to find what I’m looking for in these 2-D categorised list things (especially with no typeahead working yet). And just look how much space it’s wasting… by default, it doesn’t even fit on an 800×600 screen, and more than half the window is empty.

Wow… haven’t seen my name bandied around these parts in a while, let alone by luminaries like Havoc and Jeff 🙂 Guess that means I ought to throw in my €0.02…

Should GNOME have a “design team”? Well, I don’t think there should be any elite group of folks locked in a room who design every window we see on our screens. I do think it would be cool to have a core group of experienced usability folks whose primary role was to act as consultants to individual projects, from start to finish, responsible for whatever task analysis, requirements gathering, design and usability testing is needed along the way. And then maintaining the HIG in their copious spare time 🙂 But that’s not too far from what the GUP originally set out to do, and the UI Improvement Project before it, and neither really gained any traction in that particular area. (Nor, to the best of my knowledge, have any other big open source projects had any more success– I’d love to hear about any that have.)

FWIW, I do think there’s sometimes a downside to having two of our most experienced usability folks work for the same company, because especially with the creative sort of work those guys do, it’s always tempting (and, frankly, a lot easier) to bounce ideas around and work together face-to-face, than to seek approval and feedback from the community at every step along the way. That’s not a personal criticism of Seth, Bryan or anyone else… at the end of the day, those of us who are lucky enough to be paid to work on open source software have a duty to our employers as well as to our community, and occasionally that means not being able to do things exactly how we’d like. Unfortunately that can lead to accusations of closed-ness from time to time.

(I’d also love to see the Novell usability folks participating more… we all know they do great work from their GUADEC presentation, but personally I miss their regular input elsewhere in the community.)

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that HCI work is as subjective as Joe says, either, although nobody could claim it’s a science. But there are certainly recognised methodologies for measuring usability, both quantitavely and qualitatively, provided you know your users. That’s where we still have a bit of an issue, I think, and despite Havoc and Jeff’s pleas in the past to develop personas for the GNOME project, we still haven’t got around to it.

Finally, as for Jeff’s “haranguing” me to lead the GUP… well yes, it’s true I don’t really have the time, and I doubt I’d live up to the expectations set by Seth anyway. But as Sun are moving more towards shipping less-customised versions of GNOME in OpenSolaris and as the basis of JDS, I certainly hope to be channelling a lot more of my energies directly upstream in the not too distant future. So maybe one day 🙂

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.