"user-experience" - the right perspective
Hi, It feels good to see how the opensuse community is taking the right perspective on this topic of the usability of OpenSUSE. As a user who is trying to make the switch (not the first time), I will share some of my thoughts about my experience. I am recently trying to make a complete switch to Linux (again and as usual lots of hiccups). Every time I find it making a lots of progress in application stability and GUI capabilities. As I am a software engineer, I am also impressed about seeing the Kernel, X, Desktop Environment etc to morph into systems with designed architecture. I am here not to make complains about buggy codes all around. This is the easy part to fix. I want to emphasize on the part where "Desktop Linux" is just a nightmare compared to "Just Works" Windows. I spent the whole weekend on OpenSuSE Install and "make it work exercises" and at the end it was a broken install beyond fixing (or another few days of community email exchange to fix it). If it were windows I am sure with about 50 clicks, 5-7 list box selection and name/password typing of 30 min I would have had my box ready. Does it make Windows a better OS? NOPE!!. But It is a better "User Product". Why not? It "Just Works". You press button, it flashes a boring logo and then hola ..You with your mouse is ready to rule the world. Adding/Removing apps are AMAZING. Applications have VERY CONSISTENT look. So you most of the time know how to go about using the app and what specific windows/icon/text/menu means even if it is a application that you just installed to check out. You don't need to know about "Dependency" as, if there is something that the app I am trying to run requires then it will be taken care of instead of bothering you. I: May I have some water please? You: This involves a dependency on Mug/Bottle. Do you want to have that too? What the ...??!#!#$? I hope you see what my point is. In my early days of software engineering career, I was lucky to have a CEO who taught me a great deal about the concept "Productization". I came to learn to "code for end user". That's when I gave up showing "Initializing Inter process Communication subsystem ..." message in application startup / splash screen. They never care even if I am sending data to satellites, all they are waiting is for that stupid app UI so that they can start their work. My point being, I see Linux distributions full of amazing apps that are Code developed by programmers for programmers. Also many times the codes are "working code" that are "not productized". For example : Explain me how flashing 20/30 progress bar with downlaoding../parsing... messages help while I am adding installation source. As a engineer I can see clearly its a "developer testing" code that helps to see if download/parsing is going OK. How a end user will benefit from this messages. Also that flashing is annoying enough to nuke the programmers den. I can go all day long pointing out what I think are sins of User Experience commited in App UI, System customization, Desktop workflow, but this email was more about to appreciate the steps taken to focus on the hard part (getting a app that a user will like) than the easy part of writing few 100 lines of code to do something in a annoying way. Regards, Mohammad ------- Mohammad Bhuyan Software Engineer (R&D) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
On Sunday 13 May 2007 07:50, Mohammad Bhuyan wrote: Welcome to openSUSE Mohammad, I hope that you letter is begin of your participation in a project. I prepared more detailed answer to your mail, but there is no much sense to repeat procedure of showing that for the same basic specification that enables one to use Internet safely, Linux is installed in 40 minutes, and windows in more than 3 hours. I have that exercise from time to time so, it is experience, not a theoretical number, and when comes to applications that I have interest in, than 3 hours stretch to few days. "Just works", "user friendly" and similar, are in PC world sales slogans, not real properties, and without defining conditions of validity they have no meaning. The closest to "just works" is Apple, but it is one vendor for hardware and software, but it has one catch, if you can afford it. Last time I considered that option, what was affordable, was inferior in technical respect. Hicups in graphics when disk is accessed I can buy for much lesser money, besides I would not buy it. Apropos your main point, the user experience. Guys in this group are aware of problems, but you can solve only that much with existing resources, and they do so. More hands and heads would be better and for sure it would accelerate development to "just works". -- Regards, Rajko. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
Hi Mohammad, I also want to welcome you at openSUSE. I found it very interesting to hear/read about your experience with Linux compared to Windows and I fully agree with you. As far as I understood, your are mainly referring to our current software management. I agree with you, that we have a lot of room of improvement here. As you might already noticed we started to take care about this issue. I would very much appreciate if you would participate in that project :-) The other thing, we started working on is the redesign of the partitioner in YaST. More information will be available next week or in two weeks.
I can go all day long pointing out what I think are sins of User Experience commited in App UI, System customization, Desktop workflow.
Perfect! Then you have subscribed yourself to the right list! :-) Enjoy, Martin -- Martin Schmidkunz User Experience Specialist martin.schmidkunz@novell.com +49 (0) 911 740 53-346 ------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg) ------------------------------------- Novell, Inc. SUSE® Linux Enterprise 10 Your Linux is ready http://www.novell.com/linux -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
On Sunday 13 May 2007 03:50:21 pm Mohammad Bhuyan wrote:
For example : Explain me how flashing 20/30 progress bar with downlaoding../parsing... messages help while I am adding installation source. As a engineer I can see clearly its a "developer testing" code that helps to see if download/parsing is going OK. How a end user will benefit from this messages. Also that flashing is annoying enough to nuke the programmers den.
Aaha, I can tell you about this! Before those downloading/parsing progress windows were added, there was nothing. This "nothing" would take a lot of time, during which time the application was busy with that downloading and parsing that is now shown. What was the result of nothing shown? 80% of users thought that something is worng and killed the window, the process etc and started it all over again. Also a lot complained that it's taking too long, suse sucks and such. Now with those progress windows, users see that something is indeed going on, even if it looks like nonsense to most of them. And people understand that if downloading stuff off the net takes long it's not the fault of the distribution. This does not change the fact that it's still taking too long :-) but at least it offers an explanation and a diversion to the user. So, it's a good thing. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
Hi Silviu, Thanks for taking time to comment. I am in complete agreement with you in that showing UI signs of an application being busy is really good thing. Not showing anything will be a deadly UI sin. But the point I am trying to make is about the manner and messages used in that situation. First of all, a separate window for expressing "progress" of an operation is seems to be going against some UI philosophy. My idea of poping up an window/message box is the case of: 1. A feedback form user is needed. Usually Ok, Cancel, Discard etc. 2. An error notification If you see carefully both of this situation would need to grab user attention even if the user is busy with some other app. whereas a "progress bar" is something is of showing the status of the operation user has initiated and mostly by default user will expect it to finish. In this case I guess the best choice is to incorporate the progress notification in the same window/UI space where user initiated the operation. (For example, in the case of Installation Source, the progress bars could easily be placed in the main windows itself, even better as a list column to show the message on top of progress bar. This would also make it possible to make the refresh of repositories multi-threaded and show the progress all of all of them at the same time) Also about the sentence used in messages, How does a message like "Applying Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski algorithm" tell you? What if I say "Compressing data?". (Ok the example will not work if you know data compression stuffs.) Sometimes to much details are really unnecessary. Again I will go with a Windows example that I like. Did you notice that stupid OS whenever turned on will go on for hours slowing down your box to death with only a icon in the system tray saying "Downloading updates X%". That's all it says but I am sure behind they are replacing all their system DLLs. It never says me "Downloading ntx32-64.dll..." "Executing regsrv32 ntx32-64.DLL ... " blah blah. Mostly an end used will do not want to know such things, These don't make any sense to them. For the Experts, it would be enough to create and save a log somewhere in the system about all the details that's been done in the update. I hope you see what I mean. I guess "Please wait while files are being downloaded" or something along in that line could make a non-techie feel at home. Regards, Mohammad On 5/14/07, Silviu Marin-Caea <silviu_marin-caea@fieldinsights.ro> wrote:
On Sunday 13 May 2007 03:50:21 pm Mohammad Bhuyan wrote:
For example : Explain me how flashing 20/30 progress bar with downlaoding../parsing... messages help while I am adding installation source. As a engineer I can see clearly its a "developer testing" code that helps to see if download/parsing is going OK. How a end user will benefit from this messages. Also that flashing is annoying enough to nuke the programmers den.
Aaha, I can tell you about this!
Before those downloading/parsing progress windows were added, there was nothing. This "nothing" would take a lot of time, during which time the application was busy with that downloading and parsing that is now shown. What was the result of nothing shown? 80% of users thought that something is worng and killed the window, the process etc and started it all over again. Also a lot complained that it's taking too long, suse sucks and such.
Now with those progress windows, users see that something is indeed going on, even if it looks like nonsense to most of them. And people understand that if downloading stuff off the net takes long it's not the fault of the distribution.
This does not change the fact that it's still taking too long :-) but at least it offers an explanation and a diversion to the user.
So, it's a good thing.
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
Allow me to also suggest that we fix all those progress messages, that appear at the start and end of pretty much any Yast setup tool. They may not pop-up a window, but they are just as annoying and confusing, as they appear and disappear in an instance. I suggest to only show progress information after a few seconds, avoiding the appear/disappear effect. For the step-based progress info, if it is of any importance, have a "Continue" button that the user presses after he reads them. We could have a Yast module for this. I would suggest to make it frontend implementable, so we can adapt it to the Gnome HIG (which specified the presentation of progress information). Cheers, Ricardo Ter, 2007-05-15 às 00:18 +1000, Mohammad Bhuyan escreveu:
First of all, a separate window for expressing "progress" of an operation is seems to be going against some UI philosophy. My idea of poping up an window/message box is the case of:
1. A feedback form user is needed. Usually Ok, Cancel, Discard etc. 2. An error notification
If you see carefully both of this situation would need to grab user attention even if the user is busy with some other app.
whereas a "progress bar" is something is of showing the status of the operation user has initiated and mostly by default user will expect it to finish. In this case I guess the best choice is to incorporate the progress notification in the same window/UI space where user initiated the operation. (For example, in the case of Installation Source, the progress bars could easily be placed in the main windows itself, even better as a list column to show the message on top of progress bar. This would also make it possible to make the refresh of repositories multi-threaded and show the progress all of all of them at the same time)
Also about the sentence used in messages,
How does a message like "Applying Lempel-Ziv-Storer-Szymanski algorithm" tell you? What if I say "Compressing data?". (Ok the example will not work if you know data compression stuffs.) Sometimes to much details are really unnecessary.
Again I will go with a Windows example that I like. Did you notice that stupid OS whenever turned on will go on for hours slowing down your box to death with only a icon in the system tray saying "Downloading updates X%". That's all it says but I am sure behind they are replacing all their system DLLs. It never says me "Downloading ntx32-64.dll..." "Executing regsrv32 ntx32-64.DLL ... " blah blah. Mostly an end used will do not want to know such things, These don't make any sense to them.
For the Experts, it would be enough to create and save a log somewhere in the system about all the details that's been done in the update.
I hope you see what I mean. I guess "Please wait while files are being downloaded" or something along in that line could make a non-techie feel at home.
Regards,
Mohammad
On 5/14/07, Silviu Marin-Caea <silviu_marin-caea@fieldinsights.ro> wrote:
On Sunday 13 May 2007 03:50:21 pm Mohammad Bhuyan wrote:
For example : Explain me how flashing 20/30 progress bar with downlaoding../parsing... messages help while I am adding installation source. As a engineer I can see clearly its a "developer testing" code that helps to see if download/parsing is going OK. How a end user will benefit from this messages. Also that flashing is annoying enough to nuke the programmers den.
Aaha, I can tell you about this!
Before those downloading/parsing progress windows were added, there was nothing. This "nothing" would take a lot of time, during which time the application was busy with that downloading and parsing that is now shown. What was the result of nothing shown? 80% of users thought that something is worng and killed the window, the process etc and started it all over again. Also a lot complained that it's taking too long, suse sucks and such.
Now with those progress windows, users see that something is indeed going on, even if it looks like nonsense to most of them. And people understand that if downloading stuff off the net takes long it's not the fault of the distribution.
This does not change the fact that it's still taking too long :-) but at least it offers an explanation and a diversion to the user.
So, it's a good thing.
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
On Monday 14 May 2007 05:18:08 pm Mohammad Bhuyan wrote:
Hi Silviu,
Thanks for taking time to comment.
I am in complete agreement with you in that showing UI signs of an application being busy is really good thing. Not showing anything will be a deadly UI sin.
But the point I am trying to make is about the manner and messages used in that situation.
First of all, a separate window for expressing "progress" of an operation is seems to be going against some UI philosophy. My idea of poping up an window/message box is the case of:
1. A feedback form user is needed. Usually Ok, Cancel, Discard etc. 2. An error notification
If you see carefully both of this situation would need to grab user attention even if the user is busy with some other app.
Absolutely, the way windows pop-up and disappear in YaST update is annoying. Having established that we need a progress indicator and that it needs to be in the same window, the question is can it be done easily? -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
Silviu Marin-Caea wrote:
Absolutely, the way windows pop-up and disappear in YaST update is annoying. Having established that we need a progress indicator and that it needs to be in the same window, the question is can it be done easily?
Actually we already have a Progress module in YaST that draws those "nice" full-screen progress dialogs but not everything can be solved this way especially when one YaST module calls another modules. You might already see some improvement, for instance, in the latest 10.3 alpha when initializing the installation environment and probing the system. There used to be several pop-up windows but now, there is only one progress dialog. ---------------------------------- :: Probing System :: [x] Probing disk controllers... [x] Loading drivers... [->] Probing disks... [ ] Search for partitions [==========75%===>_____] ---------------------------------- Of course, the detail-level of presented information is unclear because the target customer might be either newbie or an experienced hacker. If you are trying to discuss what should be shown and how, please, stop to think about the target users, what they expect and whether (if we present only the most important information) we could somehow show more information on request (show details, or a "|>" icon known to GTK+ users). And of course, if you want to change how the entire YaST behaves, write also to the yast-devel@opensuse.org mailing-list ;) Thanks Lukas -- Lukas Ocilka, YaST Developer (xn--luk-gla45d) ----------------------------------------------------------------- SUSE LINUX, s. r. o., Lihovarska 1060/12, Praha 9, Czech Republic
On 5/15/07, Lukas Ocilka <lukas.ocilka@suse.cz> wrote:
If you are trying to discuss what should be shown and how, please, stop to think about the target users, what they expect and whether (if we present only the most important information) we could somehow show more information on request (show details, or a "|>" icon known to GTK+ users).
I think the system should "by default" hide the tech detail but then "must" have the mechanism so that an expert user can work with as mush as detail information presented. If I did not misunderstood what you wrote, for sure, we are in agreement there.
And of course, if you want to change how the entire YaST behaves, write also to the yast-devel@opensuse.org mailing-list ;)
I plan to do so, but not in terms of "change how the entire" concept. I am sure lots of good minds have spent good hours behind how YaST is now and going to be. As I learn more about how the system is growing and in what direction, I will try to contribute my 2 cents :P Regards, Mohammad -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-ux+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-ux+help@opensuse.org
participants (6)
-
Lukas Ocilka -
Martin Schmidkunz -
Mohammad Bhuyan -
Rajko M. -
Ricardo Cruz -
Silviu Marin-Caea