Comments on: Why I know we need usability studies

By: Stormy's Corner , Archive » GNOME Mobile: bringing the desktop and the internet together

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 14:21:40 +0000

[...] I said yesterday, it's important we understand the new user model and develop for [...]

By: Karl Lattimer

Karl Lattimer — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 05:10:46 +0000

desktop -> workspace it’s all the same

By: Karl Lattimer

Karl Lattimer — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:35:36 +0000

Its great that you’ve brought this up, a few of us have been discussing a way to achieve this kind of thing easily and cheaply.
I’ve even spent some time working on a web based usability testing framework which is wireframe based. Check out the first hackish test here;
http://www.codethink.co.uk/~karl/uitest/test1.html
It’s something that has weighed heavily on my mind over recent months. With the wireframe testing system shown the idea is to verify or dismiss a theory. I don’t want to reveal the theory I have because it would ruin the test but please email me privately to discuss this further.

By: nicu

nicu — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:22:07 +0000

Is an awareness problem, if you pool 100 random people, probably the majority will tell you that the internet is that little blue “e” icon in their desktop, it is called “Internet”.

By: Simon

Simon — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:43:15 +0000

He just doesn’t understand how the technology ties together.
And doesn’t care. That’s why usability studies are useful – because people who don’t understand technology don’t think about it in the same was as those who do.
The solution generally isn’t to reduce the ignorance, because that’s a losing battle from the start. The solution is to build things such that it doesn’t matter if they’re ignorant. People only have so many brain-cells to spare – why should they waste them on learning how their computer works, if that’s not something that interests them?

By: stormy

stormy — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:14:56 +0000

You’re right. Gmail isn’t in the cloud.
And I don’t help ambiguous terms like cloud when I misuse them …
(We also need a better word for desktop while we’re at it.)

By: stormy

stormy — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:13:54 +0000

But he’s a totally happy and successful user without understanding how it ties together. Him and millions of others.
We need to make sure it works in a way that continues to be useful and intuitive to them.

By: chuck

chuck — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:49:45 +0000

Out of curiosity, how is this a usability problem?
It seems to me it is more a technological ignorance issue. Your friend knows what each program does and how to use it. He just doesn’t understand how the technology ties together.

By: Joe Buck

Joe Buck — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 19:16:22 +0000

I guess that we’ve already lost the language war, but your email isn’t “in the cloud”. It lives on Google’s servers, with all the advantages and disadvantages that implies, and Google allows you to access it via a web browser or IMAP. We aren’t helping people understand things better when we use terms like “the cloud”, which obfuscate rather than clarify.

By: ethana2

ethana2 — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 18:55:49 +0000

The only thing keeping me from switching from gmail to thunderbird 3 is proper conversation threading.. It finally uses built in service profiles so I don’t have to read up on push and pull mail protocols and stuff, so I might consider, you know, using it.