User interface and usability

[Ben Finney]

Teemu Likonen <tlikonen at iki.fi> writes:

> As a side note, there's a git users' survey going on:
> 
>     http://www.survs.com/survey?id=M3PIVU72&channel=2WXE4BVTW8
> 
> Among other things there is a question related to the user interface. 
> It's evaluated in terms of easy to learn:
> 
>     5) Did you find Git easy to learn?
> 
>     Very easy                            6%        131
>     Easy                                23%        499
>     Reasonably                          52%       1111
>     Hard                                17%        365
>     Very hard                            2%         43
> 
>     Total respondents                             2149
>     Respondents who skipped this question          239
> 
> This shows pretty much Gaussian distribution centered around 
> "reasonably" and slightly biased towards "easy" side. The complete 
> statistics and graphs are available here:
> 
>     http://www.survs.com/WO/WebObjects/Survs.woa/wa/shareResults?survey=M3PIVU72&rndm=OKJQ45LAG8

I would posit a large amount of selection bias in those results: The
more one likes Git, the more one is prone to downplay how difficult it
was to learn, and the more likely one is to discover and answer such a
survey.

That is, those who find Git "hard" or "very hard" to learn are much
more likely to be those less involved in or committed to the Git
community, and thus less likely to discover that survey or, having
discovered it, to submit it.

So, of those interested enough in Git to fill out such a detailed
survey and submit it, I would expect the answers to "how easy to
learn?" to be Gaussian regardless of what distribution one would find
in the total population of those who tried to learn Git at all. If I'm
right, the above results don't say anything interesting about how easy
or difficult Git is to learn.

-- 
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Ben Finney