Re: [Gimp-gui] User Testing Report

[Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre prokoudine gmail com>]

On Wed, May 8, 2019 at 5:01 PM Jehan wrote:

> Anyway thanks for this report. It is interesting, though in the end I'm
> not so sure what to conclude of it. Also the more it goes, the less I
> believe that GIMP is a good candidate for user testing of the form "just
> drop someone who knows nothing about image manipulation and expect this
> person to do magic". GIMP is a complicated software, that's also because
> it does very powerful things. I don't expect a complete beginner who
> never read any documentation to be an expert in 1 hour. It just makes no
> sense. This is the same for any software of the same category by the
> way. So for instance in your user testing, I'd be more interested into
> what A and B (the only 2 experienced people) would have to say.
>
> Maybe a more interesting user testing with beginners should be done like
> this: they first follow a short introduction/lesson to common and
> limited set of features with examples of usage. Then they are asked to
> do a given task with what they have learned and the tools they were just
> explained. This would be much more interesting maybe.

I tend to disagree.

A common scenario is that a user installs software he/she sees for the
first time and tries to do something practical. If terminology is
overly complicated/nerdy, defaults are convoluted, and tools don't
work as expected (e.g. closing a path in GIMP doesn't work the same
way as in pretty much every other software, as was pointed out in the
report), chances are -- that user is lost to us. So we do need to know
how newbies see GIMP for the first time.

Blender did a fantastic job with 2.80 on defaults and accessibility of
tools. People who teach Blender say, on average, their students make a
lot more progress with 2.80 than with 2.79.

That said, I didn't understand most of the Flynn's report, because he
used alternative terminology and tried use cases that make no sense to
me. So, personally, while I appreciate the efforts, I think we'd get a
lot more from the study if we had an early preview of what was going
to happen and could provide some input.

Alex