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Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

lists.ubuntu.com

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Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#91
post #57
post #29

Nobody understood Ubuntu One. 4/11 people (P7, P9, P11, P12) thought the Me menu icon might be a close button With silly corporate-ad-campaign-flavored names like "One" and "Me" it's no wonder.

Hear hear! Almost every company tries to inflict crap like this on users at some stage. It's a prime case of marketing trumping all other factors.

Agreed. There's got to be a happy medium between failures on this end of the spectrum and failures on the other. GIMP? Really?

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#92
post #57
post #29

Nobody understood Ubuntu One. 4/11 people (P7, P9, P11, P12) thought the Me menu icon might be a close button With silly corporate-ad-campaign-flavored names like "One" and "Me" it's no wonder.

Hear hear! Almost every company tries to inflict crap like this on users at some stage. It's a prime case of marketing trumping all other factors.

Worse than that, it's bad marketing.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#93
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you were disagreeing with, but I have to disagree with your disagreeing because if 5/11 people crashed the thing in an hour , it's completely unusable for many people, me included.

When someone says "pulseaudio 2.0", they mean it in a derogatory sense ;) Also, the statement about Ubuntu being less stable than debian testing. I don't know the GPs specific instance, but Ubuntu has basically made debian a usable desktop.

When ubuntu first switched to pulseaudio it was apparently a big mess, and the "fix" was basically to uninstall it. So, calling Unity "pulseaudio 2.0" implies that the first thing everyone will want to do is switch from unity to "classic" GNOME because Unity is too buggy (right now).

As I understand it anyway, I wasn't using Ubuntu Desktop by the time the pulseaudio thing happened.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not really "invented" so much as having been called the "super" key for a long time by Unix convention, and having been adopted by Microsoft to become the Windows key where it actually showed up on consumer keyboards. If you look at a classic Solaris keyboard for example, you'll find four classic modifier keys: control, alt, meta, and super.

That doesn't matter. If you want normal people to use Ubuntu, you don't start on at them about Unix conventions.

You also can't just demand people who have been using naming conventions for twenty plus years to write off that history just because Microsoft decided to use something different.

I'm pretty sure Ubuntu adoption rate isn't affected in the least regardless of whether you call it the Super key or Windows key, or Logo key, or any of the other names it's gotten over the years. "Normal people" don't ever use that key anyways.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#95
If almost 50% of the users managed to crash the GUI with routine tasks in the span of a single hour, that's a sure sign that it isn't ready for prime-time yet, regardless of what anybody's opinions on features or functionality are.

I personally think this is almost definitely going to end up as another Pulseaudo-style debacle that'll jade even more Ubuntu users. This kind of stuff is exactly why I never recommend Linux to friends, even though I personally use it on my day-to-day machine: because it's just not (crashwise) stable enough for Grandma, and Shuttleworth has a very bad habit of making his end-users his beta-testers. Grandma isn't going to loyally log in to Launchpad, report a bug and reboot; she's going to complain to me, and then I'm going to reinstall Windows 7, which for all its faults at least doesn't crash once every two hours.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#96

It's a shame they're doing this at so late a stage. I understand that 11.04 is now in feature freeze and Unity will be released as is

Agreed, and the same thing happened, I believe, in Gnome 3. They did usability testing, but only AFTER the features were essentially frozen. Instead of using users as a guide for what to develop, they used them as a confirmation that what was already written in stone was good or bad. That's just not good practice.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#97

Some of these are humbling. They reinforce how disconnected I-- a programmer-- am from the average person. > P1 recovered amazingly well after trying to save "Letter to Mr Smith 08/04/11", and getting the vile response "Error stating file '/home/ubuntu/Documents/Letter to Mr Smith 08/04': No such file or directory" That's something I'd never consider, what with various directory separators baked into my subconscious.

Windows (certainly 7) handles this perfectly well - try and type a character that isn't allowed in a file name and it pops up a tool tip saying it isn't allowed, along with a quick list of other characters that are disallowed. It also throws that key press away, so it doesn't have to be deleted and can't cause another kind of issue. This is the difference between products which have undergone long rounds of user test…

> [...] it pops up a tool tip saying it isn't allowed, along with a quick list of other characters that are disallowed.

That still leaves me a little ashamed on behalf of the industry. Why should any characters be disallowed?

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#98
I work with Ubuntu for work ( we make ARM devices ) so every so often I have to run Natty to test if it is usable yet. If you have a "decent" OpenGL graphics card, then depending on when you install it may or may not work. I currently have an issue with working with the dock or launcher or whatever name they are calling it. Right clicks are being passed through to the desktop so I can't remove or add anything to it.

If you don't have an OpenGL based video card ( no ARM machine does, they all use a subset of OpenGL called OpenGL ES ) then upon logging in, you get a long dialog explaining that you need to logout and choose classic desktop. And it has an exit button. When you click said exit button, after a bit it loads the classic desktop, however the xsettings manager doesn't get started (or it might, just depends on if it feels like running it seems) and gnome becomes very ugly.

There is no mention of Unity-2D which is a version that is QT based. And it suffers from the same issues, xsettings may or may not launch and then you have a ton of dialogs about apps crashing in the background ( this is with either Gnome "classic" or with Unity-2D ).

Ubuntu made great strides in making the Linux desktop accessible for everyone, but this latest release shows just how much further they need to go.

Keep in mind that at the time the decision to write and use Unity was made, the Gnome 3 desktop was in an absolute mess. A lot of work has happened since then and it would be even better if Mark Shuttleworth could swallow his pride and just scrap the Unity project and work with upstream like before.

I mention the ARM bit at the beginning of my statement if only out of frustration due to the fact that our company provided Ubuntu developers with over 50 machines that are in either a desktop configuration or netbook yet it still doesn't run anywhere close to where it should on them.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#99
Where is P6? Was there one and their comments were so bad that they didn't add it to the list? Numbers missing in a list like that really bug me. It also causes me to wonder why it never comes up. I haven't read the thread since a lot earlier and being as I know a few people around the Ubuntu camp I asked them and no one seemed to have any idea why P6 was not on the list.

Re: Ubuntu Unity usability testing results and analysis

#100
post #95

If almost 50% of the users managed to crash the GUI with routine tasks in the span of a single hour , that's a sure sign that it isn't ready for prime-time yet, regardless of what anybody's opinions on features or functionality are. I personally think this is almost definitely going to end up as another Pulseaudo-style debacle that'll jade even more Ubuntu users. This kind of stuff is exactly why I never recommend Li…

I know people hate this answer, but this is how I look at that: LTS.

Seriously, I install LTS for several things: servers and non-techies. Why? b/c I view non-LTS releases as awesome for me, you, people on this site but not for my grandma.

What I've seen Ubuntu do is they have given people who want to be on the bleeding edge a way to be on the bleeding edge every 6 months, and that is freakin' awesome. But if you don't want to be there, and frankly, most people don't, they give you an LTS and 10.04 is a pretty freakin' good OS for people who check their webmail and need a writer/spreadsheet with minimal fuss.

Using this model, it is the best of both worlds.

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