Posts Tagged ‘Usability’
Have you tried the “white boy” test?
From time to time, someone in the Ubuntu community writes about the experience of introducing a “normal person” (someone who has no specific expertise with computers) to Ubuntu. These accounts provide useful feedback to Ubuntu designers and developers working to make Ubuntu easier to understand and use. They are no substitute for rigorous usability studies, but are nonetheless worthwhile. By explaining where the subject got stuck, they help to identify the most obvious usability problems. By celebrating the user’s successes, they help to build a sense of accomplishment and momentum around usability. They usually go something like this:
My grandmother is 104 years old and has never used a mobile phone before, much less a computer. One lazy Sunday afternoon, I introduced her to Ubuntu. I helped her into the den, showed her the mouse and keyboard, inserted the installation CD…
They go on to describe the subject’s attempts to use Ubuntu for common tasks, without any prior experience of the system. I will boldly hypothesize, based on my own reading and without gathering any data, that the subjects are predominantly female. Perhaps the earliest examples of this were our references to Jeff Waugh’s mother, in early Ubuntu thought experiments, as an example of an uninitiated Ubuntu user.
Thus, we generalize: Ubuntu is so easy, even your grandmother can use it, or it passes the Mother test, or the girlfriend experiment shows just how far we have to go.
These generalizations idealize women as uninformed, technological novices or intellectual inferiors, which is particularly striking to some of us who learned computing from our mothers. This is not to say that statements like these are the origin of gender stereotypes, but they do display and reinforce these (often unconscious) beliefs.
In analyzing statements about gender roles, it is sometimes helpful to substitute for gender some other trait, such as skin color or race. This helps to illustrate bias, because many of us are more sensitized to racial stereotypes: is Ubuntu so easy that a white boy could use it? Does it pass the white boy test? If my white boyfriend can figure it out, you can too! This can be a useful way to “test” language and reveal implications.
We should think twice when we read, and make the effort to investigate our own speech as well. Unfortunately, our first impulse is often to deny the possibility of bias, and treat the situation like an argument we want to win. Instead, we should try to recognize these moments as opportunities to improve our awareness, and listen for new information in the reactions of others.
It would be a huge step forward for us as a community to do better at this. We will know that Ubuntu has truly arrived, though, when becomes more popular among white people than Apple.
Ease of use is a feature
It may be an undervalued one, though. Like many other examples of good design, the best user interfaces go largely unnoticed by their users. If a user consciously notices the UI, as something separate from the task at hand, it could probably be improved.
Ease of use is a frequent topic of discussion in Ubuntu. For example, one of the primary reasons why we chose the GNOME desktop for Ubuntu is that the GNOME project was making great strides in this area, as exemplified by the GNOME Usability Project and its Human Interface Guidelines or HIG. Nearly four years later, usability is still a key consideration whenever we discuss alternative applications. Ubuntu users don’t often consciously notice if their system has good usability characteristics, though. By definition, it’s behaving as expected, and it’s human nature that this usually goes unnoticed.
Facebook is another example of this phenomenon. Like Ubuntu, Facebook was a relative latecomer in its space. There were already plenty of social networking sites at the time, some with millions of users. Today, Facebook is winning, with over 90 million users and one of the most visited sites on the web. They did a number of things right, notably their strategy to make Facebook an application platform, but one of them was usability. Their site looked and worked like a single application throughout, rather than a loosely connected universe of ugly pages. They’ve recently launched a redesign which aims to make it even simpler and more consistent, showing that they’ve maintained this focus so far. They’re even running it in parallel with the old design to measure its impact.
How about Ubuntu? Most of the software in Ubuntu is developed by other communities, but many of the applications which originated in Ubuntu exist for the sole purpose of making it easier to use: gnome-app-install (Add/Remove), Update Manager, Ubiquity (our desktop installer), Jockey (our driver manager) and UFW (our work-in-progress firewall) primarily provide a simpler interface to functionality provided by underlying tools. A system programmer wouldn’t say that they add much in the way of features, but they enable casual users to do things they couldn’t do before.
Where could we do better? I’m interested not only in specific usability improvements, but in how we can improve our overall approach to ensure that we continuously improve. The first step is to figure out how to measure how well we’re doing, and be able to try out new ideas.
How can we, as a community of users and developers, do effective usability testing, and collaborate with upstream projects to process the results? I have some ideas, which I’ll write about separately.
