[xubuntu-users] Screen saver / Light Locker

Mark Ballard markjballard at googlemail.com
Thu Jun 11 12:20:17 UTC 2015


Hello xubuntu-users

Is this the right place to publish user experience test results?

I ran a user experience test on me. I hope the results might be of some use
in improving the most excellent Xubuntu operating system's Gooey. They
contain a helpful suggestion and a faithful replay of a difficult, everyday
user experience.

The test was on fresh install of 14.04 LTS

Test details
-------------------
Objective:          Alter screen saver settings
Test challenge:  User must (i) find screen saver settings panel and (ii)
change the screen saver settings
Test scenario:     User must change the screen saver settings because they
are malfunctioning:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/xfce4-power-manager/+bug/1193716

Expected user experience:         User goes to app menu, selects
screensaver, changes settings

Actual user experience:

Action:      Look in power manager options.
Outcome: No result

Action:      Search in app menu
Outcome: No result

Action:      Look in settings menu (Informed by prior experience)
Outcome:  No result

Action:     Look under other likely groups of settings: "Display" and
"Appearance"
Outcome: No result

Action:     Ask Google: "xubuntu screensaver"
Outcome: Light Locker identified

Qualiatative user comment: Agghhhhh...ggh...ggghh...gh.

Commentary: Google is a good fall back. But since it is not entirely
accepted yet that the primary means of finding an app on your computer is
not your own GUI menu but Google, I would wager that most users will spend
a lot of time looking for the Xubuntu screen saver before they find it.

Suggestion: The app menu search box could search not only app titles, but
also sub-titles and/or descriptions. So apps that have not-functional but
clever-pants names like Microsoft Word or Light Locker will still come up
in the results when you search by their generic type, word processor or
screensaver. Ideally, all apps will have a name and a type. But since it is
not likely to happen over-night if at all that, if you were to ask app
developers to feed the o/s with an app type as well as app title, that they
would actually do this unless under threat of execution, then an interim
solution suggests itself: have the app search results display two lists of
results, one after the other (both collapsable): (i) direct hits; (ii) hits
on other app meta data (this might include: prominant position in a
manpage, for example, among its search targets).

-----

Hope this helps. I might bitch and moan about Xubuntu and the unparalleled
Thunar file browser, but that's only because I care enough, which is
because they are brilliant enough, and that it is surely the duty of any
good user to expend a good deal of her time reeporting bugs and lobbying
for them, even if it is almost always like shouting into a echo chamber.
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