Hacker News Reader

Comment by asadotzler | Hacker News Reader

"The 'usability studies' that get quoted whenever I have talked to people from Canonical about this have participation numbers that are laughably low. Having a focus group with two or three dozen hand-picked candidates to 'evaluate' complex user experience changes like these does not seem convincing to me. It seems ludicrous."

Dismissing out of hand as "ludicrous" that user research on small groups can and very often does produce useful results is enough to discredit the rest of this guy's rant. He wants to be a part of the design process but doesn't understand even the most basic practices of user research.

I am not a programmer and I do not demand representation in coding decisions and I do not criticize code choices I can't possibly understand. I wish that people who are not UX and UR practitioners would afford designers some of that same respect.

View on HN

I actually think he's right in dismissing those studies as ludicrous. You can't honestly take one or two (that I can recall) "studies" with only a dozen participants and then brand your product as "usability tested." That's just paying lip service. When you're changing a complex, deeply-ingrained interface for hundreds of thousands of people, doing two studies on a dozen people--and AFTER the fact!--and then calling it a day does indeed seem ludicrous.

Though at least Canonical can say they've done SOMETHING, which (at least I think) is more than Gnome has done. Gnome Shell gives itself a handful of breathless superlatives but I don't think they've ever once actually done a study of how real people use software. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)

In the end, though, such studies are very expensive and time-consuming, so free projects would have a tough time pulling it off. Though that doesn't discount the silliness of Canonical's attempts.

Usability guru Jackob Nielsen disagrees with you and the author: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20000319.html

He doesn't entirely disagree, Ubuntu has a huge user segmentation model, as he said, you'd need to repeat the tests for each user type.

> Dismissing out of hand as "ludicrous" that user research on small groups can and very often does produce useful results is enough to discredit the rest of this guy's rant.

In other news, dismissing an entire article based on what is only a minor detail in the overall argument is enough to discredit the rest of your rant, right?

On some websites, people think they look smart if they point out a single flaw in a long article and pronounce that they "stopped reading right there". Happens all the time in Reddit. But I'd expect better from a top comment in an HN thread. Yes, the article has flaws. Lots of flaws, actually. But discredit the whole thing because of one point that isn't even the main point?

The difference is that users can understand when the interface is poorly designed because they have to interact with it constantly. Sure, there are parts of UX that most users never think about, but when something has been overlooked, like when you can't move the launcher sidebar to the bottom, or the settings are confusing to get to, there's a usability problem.

I think the real thing about Ubuntu, however, is that it's Linux. That means if you don't like Unity, you can install GDM, KDE, Fluxbox, Awesome or any number of other window managers. You aren't stuck with the (subjectively) poor design decisions Canonical made, and you certainly have more choice than you do in OS X or Windows.

It makes very little sense to pick a distro if you dislike their default interface. There are too many choices, or you can pick a distro like Arch that is WM agnostic.

It does if you value other aspects of it: Debian package management, Ubuntu PPA's, Wayland (when that arrives), popular apps like Spotify target Ubuntu and Fedora and don't 'just work' on other distro's, etc.

Default interface is just one aspect of the decision, and some of the others may outweigh it even for those who hate the interface direction.

The difference is that users can understand when the interface is poorly designed because they have to interact with it constantly.

Can users understand the difference between poorly designed and different than what they're used to? Given that studies have shown that people think keyboarding is faster than mousing even when it's not, I doubt it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com