Default Desktop Experience for 11.04 - User testing results

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 01:33:27PM +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> Bryce Harrington wrote on 15/04/11 06:48:
> > On Fri, Apr 15, 2011 at 03:00:31AM +0100, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> > Also, these tests measure usability, but not their overall impression.
> > Did they like it?  Find it frustrating/confusing?
> >...
> 
> In my limited experience, user test participants can often be highly
> complimentary about an interface that completely failed them (or
> critical of an interface where they had no trouble). They can also start
> guessing about what other people what other people might think, or
> guessing about how easily they might learn something later.

Good point.  Even so I find the comments on their impressions adds a lot
of context to the numbers, so thanks muchly for forwarding them.

AIUI, ensuring a good initial impression was one of the major goals for
the new design work, and judging from the comments this was definitely
achieved.  Most everyone had positive comments as to the aesthetics.
My favorite is: "So I want to play with it now."

Of the negative comments, the theme seems to be around learnability,
which may also be a quirk of the testing process (people may have felt
pressure to do the given tasks quickly so they can complete the test).
But this issue has also gotten a fair bit of airing on blogs and mailing
lists.  I've heard several sources also make P4's suggestion about
making demo videos easily available.

Jorge put out a demo video on how to multitask in Unity, which I found
very engaging and enlightening.  Ideally stuff should be discoverable,
but until it is maybe an effective workaround would be to just ensure
demo videos are easily at hand?  Like a hyperlink to an online
collection of videos that's provided in the global help menu, on the
desktop, or on the welcome page of the webbrowser or something.

Bryce