4 ms·

This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive to a

by warwick 18y ago

This goes to show the value of actually watching users when they sit down in front of your system. Even though 'Click Start to Shutdown' seems unintuitive to all of us programmers, the usability study showed that it's what people expected. You can't really fault the Windows designers for following the users existing mental model rather than trying to change it.

deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
dazzawazza 18y ago
Usability studies also show the cunning of the average user. It's difficult to know if what you have presented to them is good design or 'good enough' to allow _most_ users to cope. Combine this with people's knowledge that they are in a usability test, most people's desire to please authority figures and the natural skew to any process where you can affect outcome in your favour and usability studies become a mine field. Windows is an exercise in 'good enough'. That's not a bad thing for a commodity OS. It doesn't mean that it should win any accolades though.
- Hutzpah 18y ago
  BUt it is far from 'good enough', it is a hindrance to productivity.
- etal 18y ago
  The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't "correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured out one way to do it. Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, 95 percent of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan that textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it. Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.
  - eru 18y ago
    "We of course feel terrible to all of the 95% of the users that wanted to try Mono on Windows and the Mac and ended up using a two year old version of Mono." That's humility.
Dauntless 18y ago
It's still better than "Click Vista Orb to Shutdown" imho.

by warwick 18y ago

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

dazzawazza 18y ago

Usability studies also show the cunning of the average user. It's difficult to know if what you have presented to them is good design or 'good enough' to allow _most_ users to cope. Combine this with people's knowledge that they are in a usability test, most people's desire to please authority figures and the natural skew to any process where you can affect outcome in your favour and usability studies become a mine field. Windows is an exercise in 'good enough'. That's not a bad thing for a commodity OS. It doesn't mean that it should win any accolades though.

Hutzpah 18y ago
BUt it is far from 'good enough', it is a hindrance to productivity.
etal 18y ago
The catch is, once they do figure out one way of accomplishing a task -- even if it's complicated, unintuitive, and not really what you intended -- they'll cling to it and base future actions on that point of reference. So you can't "correct" the interface without further annoying the users who already figured out one way to do it. Miguel de Icaza has an amazing post on this: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2008/Jan-24-1.html On the Mono download page, available versions for each platform were available as text links, with the platform's logo next to the links. Because of some configuration of the wiki engine they were using, images automatically linked to another page listing all the places where the same image is used. So, rather than clicking on the text link to download the latest version, 95 percent of Windows and Mac users would click on the logo, see the listing of other pages using the logo, scan that textual list for the highest version number (it's near the bottom of the list), visit the page for that one ancient version, and download it. Aside: Noting that users will only read text as a last resort, and not always even then, I wonder what the success rate is for getting past Firefox 3's "this page's certificate is self-signed" warning. It can't be any better than Mono's.
- eru 18y ago
  "We of course feel terrible to all of the 95% of the users that wanted to try Mono on Windows and the Mac and ended up using a two year old version of Mono." That's humility.

Dauntless 18y ago

It's still better than "Click Vista Orb to Shutdown" imho.