RE: Testing & A Suggestion :)

[David Grega <webmaster overtech zzn com>]

I think users just feel more comfortable with the Windows UI because you 
see it everywhere.  All you have to do is watch a half dozen commercials 
featuring a computer's UI (like the new Wal-Mart commercial or the Bud 
commercial) and you can basically learn windows.  Sure, you can modify it a 
little like was done in Gnome 1.0 where the novice could figure out what 
was going on.  I noticed one problem with novices is if you give them a 
zillion buttons at once to push, novices get scared. I noticed my father 
walked away from Linux because of the overcrowded and seemingly confusing 
desktop (and in my own opinion - overcrowded).  He liked clicking "The 
Internet" and be in his web browser connected to the internet.  Novices 
don't know what things like Emacs and Netscape are!

I think Windows is simply popular because they use simple terms to describe 
things and their programs.  Want to check your e-mail, click on mail.  Want 
to look at your documents, click My Documents.  Any dummy can understand 
that.  But when Linux comes with people having to use Netscape to go 
surfing the web - that confuses them.

----------
From:  Dick Karpinski
Sent:  Tuesday, November 28, 2000 8:17 AM
To:  gnome-gui-list gnome org; robsc dingoblue net au
Subject:  Re: Testing & A Suggestion :)

robsc is said to have remarked:

Wouldn't it be great if you could just sit down and figure it out?
Actually, the question I'm thinking is: Is windows really all that
simple? Can people learn it that easily? Or, is it just that it's so
incredibly common, that most anyone knows how to navigate through MS
os's because they are so simple? (It's an impossible/tough question to
prove: you have to get computer 'virgins' to try each GUI)

To which I respond:

Yes.

Windows is only simple compared to what came before, like OS/360.

When that interface was first introduced in 1984, it was the best change
I had ever seen in over twenty years of computing. An average guy stood
some chance of getting something useful produced in less than a week.
Not much chance and not much produced but much better than before. The
Apple sales force claimed that a new owner of a Mac could feel in control
of her machine within an hour. Mostly true. Totally remarkable. Thoroughly
impossible with CP/M or MS/DOS or OS/360 machines.

But you don't have to test on virgins if you read the cognitive psychology
literature and understand it. One prominent researcher designed a system
for a single database application which was orders of magnitude easier
to learn and use for utter novices. In his case, the novices were
executives who wouldn't touch a computer keyboard. The database was a
hospital information system. Learning time (until users were competent
and confident) was measured for Apricus at under one minute. Computer
experts generally got it in less than two minutes, but they had more to
unlearn. See chapter Six of The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin.

Dick

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