Comments on: Ease of use is a feature

By: Thorsten Wilms

Thorsten Wilms — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 11:47:21 +0000

To expand on my previous post, drawing in some material from my archive :)
On how to systematically improve usability for Ubuntu.

First: Try to agree on one central, official definition of usability!

My preferred definition of usability goes along the lines of: the combination of effectiveness, efficiency and user satisfaction for a specific context made up of a goal to accomplish, a user and his environment.

So after defining the context, you have to ask if the goal can be accomplished by the user(s) at all. Then how well it can be accomplished (there can several factors such as how long different stages take or the stress level of the user, so you need a weighting). Finally how satisfied the user feels. Happy people tend to perform better, so this could be seen as an aspect of efficiency, but it is well possible that a less efficient design is more satisfying.

All other aspects such as learnability, memorability, predictability, responsiveness, robustness, … follow from the above.

1. Incremental approach, works mainly on detail level
- Do expert UI reviews per package.
- Use checklists.
- Test by observing users.
- Use above as input for a brief conception stage.
- Implement changes and repeat.

2. Context approach, can be used outside of package boundaries
- Define user groups, environments and matching common activities/goals. Do surveys, interviews and on-site visits to learn about all these. Prioritises by importance for Ubuntu. You may have to explicitly exclude some fields.
- Break activities down into tasks (Activity: browse the web, task: find a picture of an Ibex)
- Evaluate if and how well the tasks can be performed / goals can be reached within their context with what Ubuntu currently has to offer.
- Consider the knowledge a user has to have for each task. See if it can be reduced.
- Go into research and conception to fix the holes you find.
- Implement changes and switch to 1.

3. Research approach, increase your knowledge
- Study potentially relevant HCI/usability and cognitive psychology research.
- Fund additional research if necessary.
- Build a hierarchical system of goals to facilitate objective and exhaustive judgment of concepts.
- Create concepts for basic interaction based on human-centered research (instead of what has been convenient for technical reasons).
- Add detail by going through user groups, environments, activities/tasks.

4. Vision approach, look ahead
- Create at least one scenario concerning upcoming technology, trends and cultural change in 5, 10 or 15 years.
- Extract new user goals, tasks and the resulting requirements.
- Combine this with 3.
- Write a roadmap to get from now to then and act accordingly.
- Communicate the vision and conclusions to the community.

5. Community and education approach
- Document everything of the above in an open manner. Facilitate participation.
- Publish examples of expert UI reviews and checklists and invite users and developers to try it themselves (many eyes …).
- Build or recommend a portal to usability related research.
- Build a manual on how to design or refine software UI to our best knowledge.
- Highlight successful developments.

6. Framework approach, allow it to happen.
- Make it easier to design, implement, test and change UI. Especially for those who don’t consider themselves developers.
- Push for engine/UI separation
- Build tools to manage the user- and/or activity-centered design of software. Starting from goals and requirements.

By: mdz

mdz — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:06:51 +0000

Thanks for all the feedback. Note that I’m particularly interested in how we can *systematically* improve usability, more so than specific usability improvements, though I’ll have a look at those suggestions.

By: Azrael Nightwalker

Azrael Nightwalker — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 21:24:50 +0000

I have some simple ideas:
1) add an ability to nautilus to pause and file operations (moving, copying…)
2) add an operation queuing to nautilus to prevent unnecessary disk seeks and thus slowing the whole operation
3) develop a tool to manage gnome panel(s) layout (and applets’ layout)
4) add a gui for mounting drives
5) add an option for livecd to load itself to ram and free the cd drive
6) add an easier to discover gui for autostarting programs

See also:
wiki.ubuntu.com/DesktopTeam/UsabilityWishlis
wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityGutsyIdeas/Other
wiki.ubuntu.com/CommunityGutsyIdeas/Usability
wiki.ubuntu.com/UsabilityInPractice
wiki.ubuntu.com/UsabilityTheories
wiki.ubuntu.com/GutsyForumIdeas
(I hope this comment won’t land in spam)

By: Thorsten Wilms

Thorsten Wilms — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 16:59:05 +0000

I can think of 3 broad strategies for improving the ease of use, or maybe I should say usefulness, of Ubuntu or any distribution:
- Work from the current state. I think UI reviews should play a central role. You should also define user groups, environments and tasks to analyse the usability for said tasks within context. This is important to not get stuck on a per-package level.
- Build infrastructure that will make it faster and simpler to design, implement, test and tweak UIs. Specifically make it possible for non-coders.
- Do an activity-centered top-down design of the base system. What we have now has much to do with what has been convenient, technically. I think this is necessary to address some deep issues that are hard to impossible to get at with an incremental process.

See http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/human-centered.html for a take on human-centered vs activity-centered design.

By: mdz

mdz — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:58:11 +0000

The problem with truncated posts on Planet Ubuntu should be fixed now, by switching from RSS to Atom.

By: Stefano

Stefano — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 01:19:14 +0000

I agree with jldugger. Matt, please set your blog to use full feeds.

By: jldugger

jldugger — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:53:40 +0000

What’s with the half sentence cuts? I think something like 97 percent of all planet hits are RSS based!

By: anonim

anonim — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:12:15 +0000

How about http://www.betterdesktop.org ?

Maybe ubuntu should collaborate with this proyect.

By: Zimmerman Matt

Zimmerman Matt — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:05:18 +0000

@Eric Pritchett, I’ve explored some similar ideas in a usability context. A workable approach to usability testing for Ubuntu would need to support distributed operation, remotely observing user behavior. I wonder how successful this would be with simple observation of the desktop session. The cues from the user’s physical posture can be telling, and their spoken commentary can be invaluable.

By: mdzlog

mdzlog — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:56:10 +0000

@seele, I’d like to live in a world where usability could be taken for granted this way, but we aren’t there yet. You’re right that this needs to be a core value, not something which is relegated to certain people or teams, though such people and teams can make a big difference in promoting it.

Nobody said it would be easy, but this is an area where we (Canonical in this case) can justify making an investment. Watch this space.