|
The definition of "Usability" and how it can be evaluated is an
interesting topic. I'm presenting my thoughts on it (and a little
more) at BAWorld Vancouver at the end of October. Here's [1] a link to my presentation as it provides a lot more details than this email does. It's best reviewed in slideshow mode as I have overlapping text without animations. Basically though I think the problem here is that we don't have a clear definition of who our users are. There's tribal knowledge for some that are involved, but I don't believe there's any actual consensus. I think this is part of the root of the problem that Shuttleworth mentioned in his recent presentation - Open Source struggles with usability in a different way than proprietary. Typically OSS projects have very specific users in mind during design, and then the results are used by a lot of people that were originally "out of scope" or who were not the target audience. I think Gnome Shell has the potential to experience this problem very severely and believe we should be doing early usability testing and analysis - well, too late for early, but we should get started on it asap. Gnome 3 should have a very broad audience, for obvious reasons. But that doesn't mean we should design for everyone, as then you run into the "elastic user" problem. Do we have a clear definition of Gnome 3's (or even Gnome Shell's) users, tasks, and context of use? The recent discussion on touch interfaces, notebooks etc falls into context I believe. As for design concepts - I think Schneiderman's 8 Golden Rules are a nice, manageable set (which is different than heuristics). I find them more applicable and concrete than Nielsen's list (which he created for web sites I believe) - I give quite a few examples in the presentation. I'll reply to Brian Cameron's recent post on list, but I wanted to share my thoughts and presentation on this thread too, as the topic is a very interesting one for discussion. If anyone has comments or questions about my presentation, I'd be happy to respond to them on or off list Kirk kbridger shaw ca [1] http://thebside.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/Kirk-Bridger-Eliminating-The-Odd-submitted.odp Rick Spencer wrote: I agree with Stormy. It's not an "either/or" discussion. New users and frequent users should both like the system. Probably the easiest way to get a list of what usability is "about", is to start with Jakob Nielsen's list of heuristics for his heuristic review method. This stuff has stood the test of time. The "power user" heuristic is: Flexibility and efficiency of use - Accelerators -- unseen by the novice user -- may often speed up the interaction for the expert user such that the system can cater to both inexperienced and experienced users. Allow users to tailor frequent actions. wikipedia has a good write up: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation --- On Thu, 10/1/09, Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org> wrote:From: Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org> Subject: Re: [Usability] Requesting a right-click root menu for GNOME 3 To: "Karoliina Salminen" <karoliina t salminen gmail com> Cc: "Anzan Hoshin Roshi" <anzanhoshinroshi gmail com>, usability gnome org Date: Thursday, October 1, 2009, 7:39 AM Usability is not just about making things easy for novice users. It's about making an intuitive interface for people - all people. My understanding is that many of the difficulties arise in the trade offs between the types of users. Stormy On Sep 30, 2009 11:36 PM, "Karoliina Salminen" <karoliina t salminen gmail com> wrote: On Wed, Sep 30, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Anzan Hoshin Roshi <anzanhoshinroshi gmail com> wrote: |