Re: [Usability] user levels, etc.

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Mon, 2001-11-12 at 21:09, Adam Elman wrote:
> On Monday, November 12, 2001, at 05:44 PM, Luis Villa wrote:
> > User testing suffers from strong systematic biases. The main ones are
> > twofold:
> >
> > It has a selection bias towards the uneducated and inexperienced (the
> > educated and experienced have better things to do than sit and play with
> > boxes while being watched.) This means that what user testing measures
> > is not 'what is best for users' but 'what is best for the users who
> > spend less time in front of the computer and are generally clueless.' We
> > should work on making GNOME easier to use for these people- but we
> > shouldn't assume that because they show up for user testing that they
> > are the complete universe of computer users.
> 
> Have you ever actually done or attempted to do any user testing?

Nope. Done some political psychology research, though, which bears a
strong resemblance in terms of finding focus groups and/or larger bodies
of people. And yes, there is a large body of research that indicates
that more or less no matter how hard you try and how nice you are there
are inherent selection biases at work whenever you try to find such a
group.

That said, I'm not trying to imply that user testing is useless. Skewed,
yes, but still very, very useful. I'm not trying to take away tools from
the arsenal- just trying to stress that all tools have inherent
limitations everyone should be up front about.

> > [...]
> > More importantly, and this brings us back to where I started, I don't
> > think we have to make a choice about being people-friendly and being
> > hacker-friendly. It's a false dichotomy; it's the lazy way out. There
> > are very compelling reasons to work past that and allow both camps to
> > coexist, and so we should.
> 
> Absolutely.  And to do this, we need to use all the tools in the design 
> arsenal.  We need to do user testing on representative users, including 
> hackers.  We need to do user and task analysis on users.  We need to 
> _design software for users_, not just hack stuff up for hackers.  The 
> facts are simple:
> 
> 1) Hackers are people.
> 2) Not all hackers are "advanced" users in every way.
> 3) Not all hackers are the same.
> 
> Making stuff more usable for hackers will make stuff more usable for 
> anyone, and vice versa.  It's a false dichotomy.

As long as we're agreed on this I think we're all on the same page. 

I just don't think everyone is on the same page about it, and I wanted
to raise the red flag, because I see a strong tendency to jump at the
alluringly simple 'remove options' argument before they even think about
other solutions to the problem. As long as we give good, hard, long
thought to the other options (as you said, using /all/ the tools) then
I'll be perfectly satisfied and quit my whining :)
Luis