06.22
Microsoft had major security issues for the best part of a decade and they were not caused by a rogue programmer or some bad ideas, they were caused by a culture of ignoring security. Every line of code you write, feature you add and default you set has security considerations. If you don’t consider them before you do it you end up with the mess that was the Summer of Worms, when a good percentage of all XP machines were hit. It took Microsoft years of both recoding and (most importantly) developer education and a serious change in practices to put security firmly at the forefront and with the importance it deserves and even now there are still issues caused by this dark period.
Now lets look at ‘Project Ayatana’, Ubuntu’s answer to the fact that Linux usability sucks. The thing about usability is it is like security, in that every line of code you write, feature you add and default you set has usability considerations. Although the project has obviously identified the issue (usability sucks on Linux) it has failed to appreciate that it is the culture of ignoring usability that needs to be addressed, not the usability itself. Failing to address this will still give you usability issues and trying to fix them after the fact is stupid. Again, Microsoft tried to fix security with a bunch of addons as an afterthought and it just didn’t work.
The issue is that the Linux developers simply don’t respect usability. They don’t value it as something necessary to development. Fundamentally usability is treated as ‘making it work for the dumb users’ and it shows.
Launchpad Sucks
Take Ayatana’s home, Launchpad, for example. To ‘get involved’ you must have an account with Launchpad. Ok I thought, I’ll sign up, so I went to the site, put in my email address and tried to register. Except you must open the confirmation link with the same browser you signed up for – if you open it with, say, your Blackberry it won’t work. They obviously value security by implementing such an (albeit pointless) step but if they valued usability they would have thought about this use case before. Large amounts of modern sites often don’t require a confirmation email or use OpenID to make life easier – but not Launchpad. So after trying to remember the webmail login and clicking the link from the same browser you are faced with this:
Password must be at least 8 characters long, and must contain at least one number and an upper case letter.
One number and one upper case letter. None of the standard passwords I use have an uppercase letter. Sure they are alphanumeric strings and contain all sorts of dodgy ASCII but no uppercase. I am forced to invent a complicated password which I have written on a post-it note. Security enforced again (badly) at the expense of usability.
Once you are in you are faced with a page that looks like this (right). 
There is no way to get from this page to the rest of the site – no links, nothing. It appears like you need to change your password again to get in. You need to directly put ‘launchpad.net’ into the browser address bar to actually get to the site, which doesn’t actually log you in, instead placing a ‘log in / register’ link at the top right. You then get taken to a page with a button saying ‘log in’, and clicking it logs you in – no details required (right)
. I have no idea at all why this step is required – you are logged in by virtue of it having verified your details – what is this pointless step? And why didn’t I get taken straight to Launchpad.net after signing up?
After all this work you can finally ‘get involved’ so to speak so I hopped on over to ‘https://launchpad.net/~ayatana’ to see what was going on and found that the premier discussion forum for usability on Ubuntu was a mailing list. A mailing list. I hate mailing lists. While in the last 40 years the rest of the world has moved on to other forms of dynamic web-based collaboration they are still using the good old staple of IT communication from the 70′s. Want to read over what’s been discussed? Prepare to look though the horribly presented archive which makes reviewing topics almost impossible. Want to comment on anything? You have to do that through email. It works, sure, but does it work well? No. Is it intuitive? No. Is it a pleasure to use? No. Does it encourage contributors? No, it probably sends them running screaming.
Missing The Point?
While I am not going to dismiss Ayatana as quite as laughable a failure as the Gnome Usability mailing list, which is a whole special sort of failure, it is still fundamentally missing the point:
If you want usability to improve, educate the people making the mistakes and convince them of the value of it. Trying to fix their mistakes retroactively will be an order of magnitude more effort and will almost certainly not give good results.
Usability is still seen as something for ‘dumb users’. Most developers sit in their ivory CLI based Bash/Emacs/GCC castle and make things usable for the little people when if they truly valued usability they would start by placing focus on the tools they personally use. The current system of the walled garden of usability where users and developers might as well be using a different OS says that the developers do not feel they need usability. Even simple tools are developed as a CLI version and then ported to the GUI, commonly with just a wrapper around the CLI version. You in the end have a choice between the arcane CLI version or the usually underpowered, overly simplistic and buggy GUI version.
Even now that terrible, terrible article ‘Linux isn’t Windows‘ gets bandied around and treated as fact on a regular basis when, in reality, if usability was valued in such communities the poster would be rightly ridiculed.
Ultimately if usability was a concern, and not just something for other people, Launchpad would have been the first thing to be fixed not probably the last. Actually it would have been made properly in the first place. As with security it only takes one mistake to compromise a system with usability it only takes one mistake to destroy the user experience. Wilfully making the mistakes on the rationale ‘we’ll fix it all later’ is simply not workable.
Furthermore
Such as ‘easy’ has been co-opted to mean ‘quick to do once you have learned how to do it, irrespective of learning curve’ by the FOSS community, the terms usable and usability are quite often redefined to support the status quo. Take the following link for example: Usability Comparison: Five PC Operating Systems Compared.
The basic premise is ‘lets reduce usability down to how many clicks an operation takes’. Guess what, Windows 7 falls as a far last with this fantastic quote:
I honestly did not expect Windows 7 to fall behind so badly. I could probably fine grain the tests further, but then I would begin to react more on the impressions that I get from the OS rather than the simple ease of use, or lack of hoops to jump through.
That’s what happens when someone who knows nothing about usability but who likes Linux takes a scientific approach to it. I mean, ‘simple ease of use’ indeed. The best bit is this, though:
Kubuntu follows the normal mantra, right-click on desktop to change your background. Thing is, the item you need to click on is “Desktop Activity Settings.” Once you have that figured out (to my shame I had to Google, because for the life of me I could not find where to change my background simply because of the cryptic naming) you can select a background as per normal.
That’s right, he actually had to use Google to find out how to change wallpaper on Kubuntu. It really is that unintuitive. However Kubuntu was not penalised for the added time (And got 4 points to Windows 0) as it fell outside the remit of the test and as such beat Windows. It could be argued that if you just made the whole screen as a 1280×800 grid of single pixels you could assign a function to each one (just over 1 million functions) to a pixel and have the most ‘usable’ system in the world. All you’d need is a look up table and a ruler!
So, on the incredibly unlikely event that someone from Canonical reads this, actually cares and is in the position to do something, start a project on educating developers (and users) on what usability is and why it is important as I don’t see anything else working. Considering the bulk of the developers don’t even know what it is you’ve got a large job ahead!
Hey there. You do realise that I re did that comparison don’t you? I really like this article, but you do come across as a bit of a Windows apologist.
Have a look at my updated comparison, and let me know if that addresses your critique.
It is available here: http://g33q.co.za/2010/06/08/user-interfaces-compared-five-operating-systems-twenty-tests/
Also, I do know a bit about useability – and dislike Linux failures as much as you do. See also my article titled “Why Linux should not get a free ride”
http://g33q.co.za/2010/06/10/opinion-why-linux-should-not-get-a-free-ride/
And finally, have a look at my seven day series covering my experiences with Gnome Shell, starting with a first impression.
http://g33q.co.za/2010/06/14/gnome-shell-ubuntus-new-interface/
You will note that I am highly critical of Gnome Shell, it takes many backwards steps as far as useability goes.
I take my comparisons really seriously, and if you have any other tests that in your opinion need to be included I will be more than glad to consider them
I really hope that this article gets read by the guys from Canonical, but also by the wider Linux community. The beauty of FLOSS is that you have a better chance of your critique doing something than in the proprietary world.
TO further the spirit of opennes and working together to improve things, would you mind if I quote you in the SaGeek magazine for July? I’ll do a short writeup on useability and add a piece from your blog. (It is a free mag so I can’t offer you payment unfortunately)
Kind Regards
Q
Dude, he uses a Mack. Enough said.
I hate mailing lists.
You and me both. Half the time the only way to actually follow a discussion is to subscribe and then you only get the new stuff. Even then you’re praying that your email client is smart enough to thread/group discussions properly, which is no guarantee given all the amateurish header rewriting the things do. On top of that you have to pray, additionally, that everyone replies to the list correctly, that their foreign character sets don’t activate any weird escape sequences, and that their system time is correct because in 2010 these things still aren’t smart enough to correct minor shit like that. After all that you’ve basically trashed your mail account because anything more than some dude’s weekend traffic will be so deluged by chatter and spam that you’ll need to write some filter to funnel it to its own drop box, assuming whatever webmail likely used for this is even sophisticated enough to accomplish such a thing.
Compare this to the forum model. Threaded topics ordered by date. Immediately accessible (usually) archives. Search function. Greater variety of subtopics as opposed to “foobar-users” and “foobar-dev”. And, most importantly, forums attract non-technical users (customers). The only people who make it onto mailing lists are those aware of the previously mentioned limitations and are knowledgeable/motivated enough to overcome them. The most annoying thing about forums is going through the 45 second verification to post responses (or view “attachments” in the case of vBulletin, which is admittedly a freetarded concept).
What makes mailing lists the ultimate fail are the cottage projects revolving around subscribing to popular mailing lists and reformatting the correspondence into something familiar, like a threaded “message board”.
The thing that annoys me about forums are those where they’re basically file shares but you have to register to see any of the stuff and to register you have to get approved and to get approved you have to submit an essay about why you want to join this elite forum for discussing 50-year-old recordings that hardly anyone cares about. True story. If it’s a file share, use a file sharing program. If it’s stuff that’s not worth anything, don’t pretend it is.
@quintin
Sure, quote away. I’ll check your further comparisons at some point if you’ve improved on it. I tend to be viewed as a Windows apologists because most people just assume Windows sucks and base anything from that viewpoint. You get people saying “You have to click start to shutdown, how unintuitive” when it is intuitive that way as they are just grasping at things to bash Windows with because it’s cool and makes them look 1337.
I think your approach is also fundamentally flawed for two main reasons:
1: You cannot really do a usability assessment scientifically – the subject is too nuanced and complex to reduce down with tiny things mattering greatly.
2: Usability should not really be done in a comparison fashion because of point 1. Because of the massive differing approaches taken it’s like comparing Word to Excel. Programs should be assessed within the scope of what they are trying to do rather than what something else is doing.
Discoverability is probably the key element in Usability (rather than what you covered which is Efficiency). In the sample ‘change wallpaper test’ you start from ‘right click on desktop’, because that’s how you do it, but no user would actually ever do that as it’s not obvious – they would instead either go through the control panel or more often open the picture in preview/firefox/etc and set it from there. Redoing the test from a discoverability point of view would probably give different results.
A proper assessment would be to pick a task and try to achieve it only by going from the information presented or what seemed like the correct choice (trying to think like a user). Having to ‘Google’ represents an absolute failure and should get a zero mark which is so often the case in Linux.
P.S. Ameer is right, my main computer is a MacBook Air.
@Tux
Well said. I had to turn off alerts or my blackberry just sits and buzzes like a ladies plaything. Ridiculous.
4 Points for something you have to Google, but 0 for Windows is laughably laughable (intentionally redundant, btw).
Why do these idiots even do comparisons. I don’t even know why a Linux fanboi would even bother to do a Linux/Windows comparison and expect to be taken seriously.
That’s just my opinion.
Both Google and Microsoft moved on to A/B testing for design changes, because apparently design staff suck at predicting how a certain design change will impact “usability”.
Perhaps Google will drive for better usability in Linux, but they don’t seem interested in a proper desktop environment, only a way to connect to cloud services.
Data Driven Product Development: Experimentation and A/B Testing:
(Ronnie Kohavi from Microsoft and Sandra Cheng from Google, both Amazon graduates)
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/2134721
Link to the slide show he uses:
http://exp-platform.com/expMicrosoft.aspx
@Adrian Enzo
A/B Testing is putting the cart way in front of the horse. At the moment I would say they are C testing, where C is an unplanned mess of changes – after all you can’t really test the effectiveness of your plan if you have no plan.
Links look interesting though I’ll look at them later!
@quintin:
“I really hope that this article gets read by the guys from Canonical, but also by the wider Linux community. The beauty of FLOSS is that you have a better chance of your critique doing something than in the proprietary world.”
A deeply flawed beauty. You might think it’s inherent in the principles, but it doesn’t manifest itself in the reality.
(One of the problems with your assumption, btw, is that with computers, Everyone Is An Expert. Even Mark Shuttleworth. Consequently, the only drive to improve things like usability is commercial. You may have heard of a bloke called Steve Jobs?)
From your link, http://g33q.co.za/2010/06/10/opinion-why-linux-should-not-get-a-free-ride/:
“I love that Linux Distro’s are more user friendly than their competitors.”
Not to be picky, but lose the greengrocer’s apostrophe. Every Linux Distro, eg Slackware? Any particular Linux Distro? What competitors? The only competitors to Linux Distros are other Linux Distros. And did you come to this conclusion before, or after, your usability testing? Judging by the date, it’s after.
I don’t think you realise that “usability” is an issue far, far in the future for Linux (whatever kind words Kerberos might throw at it). It’s utterly worthless trying to measure usability against an alternative platform when you can’t even get people to *try* the alternative platform.
I’m sorry to say that the weird evangelical fervour of that link isn’t going to convince any IT professional to try Linux on the desktop. Equally, the complete lack of “Linux for dummies” style detail is not going to sell it to the average Joe in the street.
And I know that I’m being unfair, and that a single blog post could hardly expect to achieve a fraction of that. It’s an important point, though. Every single Linux blog out there is practically indistinguishable from yours. Not only are they preaching to the choir, but the choir ain’t listening.
@Kerberos: has TMR done a Fud on “Linux is not Windows?” If so, it should.
I’ve never seen so much bullshit in all my life.
@Kerberos: has TMR done a Fud on “Linux is not Windows?” If so, it should.
I’ve never seen so much bullshit in all my life.
Oh dear, here comes another duplicate comment. Usability? Single click on the submit button? This is absurd.
Hey Dr Loser.
I see you commented on that blog entry of mine and I dealt with the comments there.
Let me just say, you blatantly ignore the aim of that particular entry – it is aimed at Linux developers who expect to be given a free pass quality wise because they offer a free product.
I want FLOSS (and there I used Linux as the example) to be held to high standards, I welcome criticism (fair criticism) of FLOSS products because I believe that improves the product should the criticism be taken to heart.
Two things. FIRST, I disagree with a lot that @Kerberos has written here, but I welcome the opportunity to debate him/her and engage in an exchange of ideas.
SECOND, you are the only one here to have submitted dupes, why hold the blog author to task for that? The Internet is single click by default.
“•Play Youtube Video (View FLASH Site)
Does Youtube play out of the box? Is there 64bit flash support for the OS?
◦Win7 – 33.33 (Need to install codec, and no 64bit support for flash)”
Are you kidding me?
Adobe dropped Flash x64 for all OSes again. Secondly, that is not Microsoft’s thing to do.
However then
“•Play MP3
Does MP3’s play out of the box?
◦Win7 – 100
◦Ubuntu – 50 (Will probably never ship with MP3 support out of the box.)”
Fair comparison. If on Windows, you gotta perform two clicks to install Flash ( in IE, it’s clicking that yellow bar and authorizing the addon for install; in Firefox that addon installer dialog will guide you through the install as soon as you need it ), then that’s 33.33 rated, but if on Ubuntu you gotta follow this awesome guide https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/MP3 to install the restricted package, then that’s a 50 rating.
“•Open PDF
Do you want to open a PDF? Yes? Okay let’s see if it is supported out of the box then.
◦Win7 – 33.33 (PDF reader not installed, need to get it from the web, no repo available.)”
No repo available? Are you serious?
Anyway, this comparison is again unfair. Microsoft could not ship any PDF reader with Windows, due to their ancient anti-trust suite. So if you say Windows is lacking usability because you can’t open Flash out of the box, since they’d get sued by let’s say Foxit for boundling a PDF reader, then that’s anti-usable. Sure.
“•Look for new/specific software and functionality
How easy is it to get a software package from a trusted source? How easy is it to get software for a specific need?
◦Win7 – 43.86 (Win7 needs a trusted software repository)”
43.86 from 100 ? Not .87 maybe? And again Microsoft cannot provide such an repository. Also, a repository does not increase usability necessarily.
You mostly just checked, is X installed by default, and then bring up the repo point. There are sites like download.com, CNET, majorgeek, etc., where you do have a ‘trusted repository’ of software. Since most software for Windows is proprietary, that wouldn’t help at all. What would a repo help if you can’t install expensive proprietary software Y? Right, nothing.
“•Check For System Updates
How easy is it to check if your system is up to date? I did test auto updates since all of the OS’s tested automatically check for updates. Win7 is unique in that if you set it to auto update it will ask you to reboot, and nag you constantly. The longest you can delay the auto reboot is four hours. If you miss the nag screen when booting, or switch on and go and make a cuppa, you might just come back to a rebooting laptop.”
It won’t, you can postpone it by 4 hours. And you should reboot anyway, one an update has been performed. On both, Windows and Linux. Linux just can’t tell that you need to reboot if you upgraded some library that is still in use. It won’t tell you anything, while the old version of the library might be still in memory.
“•Shut Down
You want to shut down? How many steps does it take?”
Now explain me that, please. On virtually every OS, Windows, Linux, OSX, BSD, Solaris, there is a shutdown button. What usability is that?
“How easy is it to check if your system is up to date? I did test auto updates since all of the OS’s tested automatically check for updates. Win7 is unique in that if you set it to auto update it will ask you to reboot, and nag you constantly. The longest you can delay the auto reboot is four hours. If you miss the nag screen when booting, or switch on and go and make a cuppa, you might just come back to a rebooting laptop.”
It won’t, you can postpone it by 4 hours. And you should reboot anyway, one an update has been performed. On both, Windows and Linux. Linux just can’t tell that you need to reboot if you upgraded some library that is still in use. It won’t tell you anything, while the old version of the library might be still in memory.”
I love when people bring this up. Windows requires reboots because it is actually more advanced and there is almost no sane way of changing code running in memory. Linux, on the other hand, relies on hardcoded flags in their packages to indicate if something is critical enough to require a restart.
The fact that Windows forces people to update and reboot is the result of people ignoring and dismissing the warnings indefinitely until they get exploited. If you don’t want it to hassle you constantly to update there is a setting for that, but for the average users it pretty much makes them update, which is a *good* thing.
I also never got the shutdown metric. I haven’t used the shutdown feature on any os for over 6 years simply because you might as well hibernate or standby. The only time to shutdown is to restart, either way it’s generally used as much as most minor functionality and thus does not deserve reference in any major analysis.
And as ChrisTX points out, many things Microsoft simply cannot do due to antitrust considerations. Holding them up as failing for that while calling ‘evil monopoly’ constantly simply isn’t cricket.
“Oh dear, here comes another duplicate comment. Usability? Single click on the submit button? This is absurd.”
Yeah, it’s WordPress. I acknowledge the flaws and would even join you in the bashing but there is not a whole lot I can do about it. ITS OPEN SOURCE FIX IT YOURSELF WHARGARBLL!!!
It is extremely poor and evidence of complete ignorance if you compare the lack of out-of-the-box features from Windows to the bloatfest of applications that ship with Linux. Microsoft can’t even preinstall a simple E-Mail client, let alone a Webbrowser, without getting sued from all over the world, whereas in Linux they can even pack a whole office suite into the default installation and bloody nobody gives a fuck. Give Microsoft the freedom all those other freeloaders have and they will provide an operating system second to nothing.
The most laughable argument however is the reboot one after a critical system update. All those Linux pros seem to be too stupid to shut down the service responsible for the nagging screen. Seriously, hacking arcane CLI commands all day and being too ignorant to know how to identify and close a simple windows service. If it is so important to delay the reboot beyond the 4 hours mark, just shut down the service… but hell, tell that to the guys who are still being proud of their ridiculous owner/group/world user-rights system from the 70′s, whereas the so much hated Microsoft ships Windows with ACLs since 2000. Talk about backwardness.
@quintin:
“The Internet is single click by default.”
Well, there goes twenty five years of working on computers, then.
There is no *default*, young man. In the case of a Web page (which is by no means coterminous with the Internet), a button is controlled by Javascript. Javascript is designed to work off an event model. There are many possible events, and each event possibly has a handler.
Now, if you’re lazy (and quite a lot of blog software is: cf blogger), you don’t bother with the double-click event. You just hope that you get a single click, and then you “gray out” the event handler. This usually works, in a sense, but it’s sub-optimal from a usability point of view (remember? We were talking about usability) because the user typically sees a “javascript:” comment.
If you’re even lazier, and I assume the author (not Kerberos) of this particular blogging framework is even lazier, then you open yourself up to a double posting when your user is, like me, sadly equipped with a three-year-old mouse and desperately needs an upgrade.
Well, that’s the technical analysis. But you’re a Linux Guru: I must defer to your superior analysis that I don’t actually know what I’m doing.
I believe I’ll just take a quick stroll over to your idiot http://g33q.co.za/2010/06/10/opinion-why-linux-should-not-get-a-free-ride/ and check for further unsubstantiated trash.
“A mailing list. I hate mailing lists. While in the last 40 years the rest of the world has moved on to other forms of dynamic web-based collaboration they are still using the good old staple of IT communication from the 70′s.”
THANK YOU.
Yes.
A thousand yeses.
The freetards consistently believe that just because something is harder to do, its better, hence the obsession with text-based IDEs and collaboration models from 1976. It should be called the manual fallacy or something, because they seem to think that just like a manual versus automatic transmission, the steeper the learning curve, the better it must be.
Windows needs to reboot after each update because it’s was (and still is) made for trashy computers which couldn’t hold all binary in memory and had to use mmapping, effectively locking updated binary on disk. Linux, on the other hand, is not stuck in 1993, and uses memory image, allowing to painlessly update underlying file without the need to postpone the reboot for an year…
Microsoft could not ship any PDF reader with Windows, due to their ancient anti-trust suite. So if you say Windows is lacking usability because you can’t open Flash out of the box, since they’d get sued by let’s say Foxit for boundling a PDF reader, then that’s anti-usable. Sure.
Yeah, meanwhile Apple gets a free pass to bundle PDF support into their Preview app, document icon renderings, and spotlight.
Linux, on the other hand, is not stuck in 1993, and uses memory image, allowing to painlessly update underlying file without the need to postpone the reboot for an year…
The 1993 remark is pretty funny considering how you laud an OS that hails from the 70′s and routinely forces you to drop to the 70′s era CLI.
If what you’re saying is the case, why do so many updates in Linux require me to reboot? Vince, over on Linsux, has several Ubuntu review videos that required him to restart during several installation and repo-update processes.
Finally, have you ever actually updated a video driver in Vista or 7? You might be surprised.
Canonical just distributes the crap that third parties made. Honestly, they lack the manpower of influence to change things. All these usability efforts that they are supposedly involved in are just another way to attract attention to them.
They’re not the Apple of the Linux world and they’ll never be. They have no business model and can’t afford to.
It’s John Gruber all over again:
http://daringfireball.net/2004/04/spray_on_usability
So even Quintin – who wants to meassure usability – doesn’t really know about it. Shuttleworth obviously doesn’t, either. ESR ? RMS (snicker) ? So who in the land of the penguin knows and cares about usability ? I fear that JG is right: “Unix nerds who care about usability are switching to Mac OS X in droves.”
And of course JG layed wide open the fallacy of thinking of a GUI as something for “dumb users”:
“If there’s a glib, nutshell synopsis for why Linux desktop software tends to suck, it’s this: Raymond and his ilk have no respect for anyone but themselves. They have no respect for the fact that UI design is a special talent. They have no respect for the fact that good UI design requires a tremendous amount of time and effort. And, most importantly, they have no respect at all for real users. The idea that GUI software needs to be designed for “dumb users” (…) is completely wrong. Great software developers don’t design for morons. They design for smart, perceptive people — people just like themselves. They have profound respect for their users.”
Six years later, and still …
You’d think having to Google something would bring the score down much more than an extra mouse click.
Yeah, meanwhile Apple gets a free pass to bundle PDF support into their Preview app, document icon renderings, and spotlight.
Not only that, there are a lot of things where Microsoft is in a disadvantageous position. I mean, I am sure they would boundle Flash, Silverlight and a PDF reader. If not Adobe or Foxit, then maybe a self-written PDF reader. I am sure they’d merge XPS and PDF in one reader, so that Windows would support both out-of-the-box. Recently, Ed Bott wrote an excellent article about this very antitrust lawsuit: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/how-a-decade-of-antitrust-oversight-has-changed-your-pc/2191
Sure, this lowers the usability of Windows a bit. You’ve got to download an AV, Flash, a PDF reader, Silverlight, etc, but that’s all it did. Argueing any of those to be complicated is definitely FUD.
You’re right about Launchpad. I absolutely hate it. It’s not user friendly at all. I prefer Google Code for everything I do.
By the way, I’ve never even touched a mailing list.
And one more thing, I’ve installed Windows 7 on my laptop, and am slowly working my way back to Windows…
You’re right about Launchpad. I absolutely hate it. It’s not user friendly at all. I prefer Google Code for everything I do.
Please Thomas, point us to all your Google Code repositories. I’m in need of a few laughs.
@TMR
After seeing kenny strawn’s amazing automatic driver creator I won’t ever find code funny again.
@Kommenter
Not fair. Give us the link…
@Kerberos
Just a throw-in from one of your other usability links: http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability
I only mention it because the original link was dead.
@Dr Loser
Behold the greatness:
DeviceMatic – An advanced piece of software capable of automatically building device drivers:
bazaar.launchpad.net/~mango-k/devicematic/files/annotate/head:/search.cpp
LibRGBA – To stupid to describe:
bazaar.launchpad.net/~mango-k/librgba-c++/files/annotate/head:/librgba-c%2B%2B.cpp
gtk2-module-cube – I’ll just write the description…
“For the record, there already is a cube with Compiz. But what if there also was a cube defined in GTK+, as such that GNOME wouldn’t require Compiz, and also be able to use such geometry to be able to animate themes, such as create a Flip3D-like task switcher or zoom out of the desktop, for instance? This could ultimately allow the cube to exist on less-powerful graphics cards, as well as other 3D effects.”
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mango-k/gtk2-module-cube/files/annotate/head:/libcube.cpp
hey! it accepted one link? nice.
All Kenny Strawn seems to do is define cubes and rectangles in his code!
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~mango-k/devicematic/files/annotate/head:/structs.h#L25
i find it funny that some of hist code shouldn’t even compile yet there’s clearly an .so file in there… This guy can bend gcc to his will!
Mhm.. may be I am just weird, but:
I love mailing lists. I tried both, forums and mailing lists, but I prefer the latter. I think a “push” approach is better for this kind of purpose. Forums I forget to visit, so that I selten contribute unless I have a problem, which makes it pointless to subscribe to them in the first place. I do subscribe only to lists with few traffic, though. You do have to care about using good email software,though.
And I find the CLI to be a fairly usable interface. I am far from a power user, but I have found a lot of things that can be accomplished far easier from the CLI, than from the GUI.
As for the Internet being one click, well, I think that’s missing the point. *Buttons*, on the other hand, have in my experience always been single click in whichever platform.
I do agree that usability is pervasive through the interface design process, and that a developer that forgets this is shortsighted, but bashing the Ayatana efforts because of Launchpad’s design and the mailing lists is… well… lame and kind of childish, to say the least.
If it helps any, here’s a different perspective on bashing Ayatana: http://www.tmrepository.com/fudtracker/nine-parts-doinking-around-one-part-irrelevancy/.
Frankly I think Kerberos was being too kind.
That single click thing, btw? Nothing to do with the discussion at all. Just somebody having a go at me for perceived ignorance. (Who knows? We are all ignorant, and computers are to blame.)
In all fairness, the Ayatana/LaunchPad threaded list isn’t bad, in and of itself. Well, not currently, anyway. There are only about six pages, and I reckon a simple pruning/archiving exercise would keep it manageable. Of course, that will never happen. It’s against Freedom…
There is, definitely, a usability issue, and it speaks to a broader theme; which is this. They’ve taken, if you like, a green-screen technology (threaded mailing lists) and applied a varnish coat of webbiness to it. *This never works.* But that doesn’t stop myriads of companies, from Rational downwards, using it as a lazy excuse for getting the user experience right in the first place. Because we all love web pages, right?
Not when they’re butt-ugly and don’t conform to the normal expectations of a web user. This particular example, although the cognitive dissonance is reduced by the limited amount of information presented, is fairly typical. It really does make you want to run away, screaming.
It doesn’t help that — and this is another thing I’ve noticed in faux-web front ends — the opening page is something called a “Date Index.” This is thoroughly useless. Whilst the ordering makes (some sort of) sense for an RSS feed, it is quite simply not acceptable for presentation to a human being. Of course, you can click on the Thread Index link to get a more traditional listing; but you have to ask yourself, why is this not the default.
I agree. Not a good sign.
“And I find the CLI to be a fairly usable interface. I am far from a power user, but I have found a lot of things that can be accomplished far easier from the CLI, than from the GUI.”
Get a mac and play around with automator, then we talk.
@Kommenter
Don’t be silly. On Linux, there are indeed “a lot of things that can be accomplished far easier from the CLI, than from the GUI.”
One has to wonder why this might be.
I work for Canonical, but I am speaking strictly for myself here. Formerly I was in the Launchpad team, working on pages like that login page. Now I’m in the Design team, working on things like Ayatana. I’m also the author of the essay Dr Loser linked to. That, in turn, is the second edition of an essay John Gruber mentioned in the article Carsten Hardt linked to.
Ubuntu went for four years before the Ayatana project. Canonical went for four years before having a Design team. In both cases, as with open source in general, there is massive inertia. Turning the ship around so that we start practising a thorough UX process will be slow and difficult. For example, everyone I know on the Launchpad team cares deeply about making it pleasant to use, and yet the login process got into the pitiful state you illustrate. And we actually employ the GNU Mailman maintainer, and yet the archives for Launchpad’s integrated Mailman mailing lists are even less pleasant to use than the archives for vanilla Mailman lists. We have no excuses for this.
I disagree that “You cannot really do a usability assessment scientifically”. You can, it’s just much more expensive than the kinds of testing volunteer developers are used to. You can measure things like the cumulative percentage of users who complete a task over time. You can survey user satisfaction. Even the proportion of users who complete a task at all is a useful scientific measurement. Yesterday one of my colleagues in the Design team was running a user test on Rhythmbox — and discovering, for example, that approximately zero percent of the test participants could figure out how to subscribe to a podcast.
Now, Rhythmbox has existed for eight years. How often have its developers run user tests? So far as we can tell, never. Gnome Shell has been developed for over a year, and how often have its developers run user tests? So far as we know, never. This is nonsense. It needs to change. Ayatana is not currently the answer to that, but we have never claimed that it was. We do run user tests, but that’s not part of Ayatana, and we can’t test everything ourselves.
“I disagree that “You cannot really do a usability assessment scientifically”. You can, it’s just much more expensive than the kinds of testing volunteer developers are used to.”
I agree actually, what I meant was that you cannot boil app A down to number N, and app B down to number M and then say A is better than B because N is greater than M. Usability has more nuance than that. You can present logical, rational explanations on why decision A is worse than decision B but assigning scores in a ‘scientific’ fashion isn’t exactly possible. You need to use argument and judgement calls.
“Now, Rhythmbox has existed for eight years. How often have its developers run user tests? So far as we can tell, never. Gnome Shell has been developed for over a year, and how often have its developers run user tests? So far as we know, never.”
I am assuming you have read the trigger point for the JG article – http://catb.org/esr/writings/cups-horror.html – and the main thing that struck me about it (the four years ago when it was written) – was that there were two options here with regards to cups, either nobody had pointed the problem out yet, or just nobody had listened. And I don’t believe it is the former. Is ESR unique in that he is the first person to notice, or that he has a voice that is hard to just dismiss as an idiot newbie troll?
FOSS has this focus on Bugzilla to cure all ills, and virtually no way of giving user feedback outside Bugzilla – if it crashes, that’s great, if it’s ugly and convoluted, not so much. There is plenty of user feedback coming at FOSS products but instead of listening, numerous barriers have been erected. Take Ubuntu, it’s mostly from upstream and Ubuntuforums are not even ‘official’*. There are various Ubuntu projects, I even tried to get involved with Ubuntu Art, but there was nobody official actually reading the mailing list see – http://piestar.net/2009/06/16/jump-in-my-time-machine/ – for my views. I eventually found my way to the Gnome Usability list, which receives less posts than this blog. Where is usability being discussed?
Simply put there is nobody listening and no effort to actually engage the community. The only type of user feedback you are going to get is going to be by people on a few random blogs as there is nowhere (accessible) for people to discuss such issues – except a few hidden and largely dead mailing lists. In fact the first few months of this blog was me just ranting into the void as a cathartic exercise as there was pretty much nowhere else that would accept my frustrations.
While Ayatana seems to have it’s heart in the right place it’s a drop in the bucket and doesn’t tackle the issues of the lack of value and understanding of the problem. As I pointed out if something is to be done it should be a public campaign to try to get developers and users to understand the problem and involve people who have issues. At the moment if you try to discuss problems in the bulk of the ‘Linuxphere’ you get called a troll and a Microsoft shill.
* I have been told numerous times not to discuss usability on UF as, and I quote, ‘The developers don’t read these forums’
P.S.
“And I find the CLI to be a fairly usable interface. I am far from a power user, but I have found a lot of things that can be accomplished far easier from the CLI, than from the GUI.”
Exhibit A on why you need to educate the public on what usability is. This post represents the majority opinion of the Linux community on usability and it is too pervasive to fight from the bottom up and no progress will ever get made until it is changed.
Exhibit A on why you need to educate the public on what usability is. This post represents the majority opinion of the Linux community on usability and it is too pervasive to fight from the bottom up and no progress will ever get made until it is changed.
Funnily they never provide any real life example on how exactly the CLI accomplishes something more easily than a (well designed) GUI application. When asked they only come up with stuff like “searching and renaming files with regex-patterns” or “listing all open files and piping the output through ssh to my mailing system in Peru every Friday night”.
“searching and renaming files with regex-patterns”
It’s the one thing, and even then i’d rather write a script in python to do this, it’s much more readable.
Windows powershell is also much easier to use then bash.
“listing all open files and piping the output through ssh to my mailing system in Peru every Friday night”.
Good god! Why?
It’s the one thing, and even then i’d rather write a script in python to do this, it’s much more readable.
Windows powershell is also much easier to use then bash.
Same here… just that I do it in C#
. Powershell is not only much easier but way more POWERFUL(!) than bash or any Unix shell could ever be… you can easily use every class/method from the .NET-Framework and even your own Assemblies for your powershell scripts. No amount of unix tools piping together could ever achieve such versatility.
Good god! Why?
Because that’s something $tallman would do. And you don’t question the $tallman!
@mpt
Nice post. I’m still unconvinced, though. What, exactly, does Ayatana offer in terms of usability?
Kerberos may have penetrated the thickets of Mr Shuttleworth’s claims more accurately than I, but to me, Ayatana seems to consist of nothing but “notifications” and “indicators.” The first one seems actively anti-usability for 80% of users, and the second one seems, if you’ll excuse me, to be pie-in-the-sky. All this stuff from Mark about “persistent state” is splendid, but it doesn’t actually address what the damn things do and why they’re doing it. I’ve probably missed a good link to an explanation, so by all means supply one.
I’m also worried about this (Shuttleworth’s) talk about getting ahead of the game and needing “fantastic upstream support” (I presume from KDE and Gnome developers). I mean, good luck, but upstream and downstream haven’t exactly got along too well in the past.
Looks like more lipstick on a pig, to me, but I’d happily be proved wrong.
@mpt
– or, in fact, you could give this blog a world exclusive! What exactly are indicators, anyway? (We don’t get many folk from Canonical here, so I’m taking the opportunity to ask somebody who can actually provide a decent explanation.)
I was never really sure what any of this had to do with Launchpad, either. Perhaps that’s a different topic.
Indicators (or ‘Windicators’) as far as I can tell is essentially an application specific system tray. Actually its the status bar from the bottom of the application moved to the top with it’s entire purpose changed. What I get from reading all the talk is the feeling that it is a solution seeking a problem, and Ubuntu specific to boot. It seems based around the terrible idea to put an application volume control in the app and as well as the system volume control in the system tray and then proceeding with more changes to make this idea actually viable. As with geek ideas, yes, it’s cool, but no, it’s not useful or particularly usable. It’s all based around maximising the application so its bar merges with the top bar. I really have no idea why they would be willing to break and change everything for the purpose of saving 16px on netbooks.
Oh, for the lulz here’s a screenshot of ‘Unity UI’, the one of latest Ubuntu projects overlayed on top of a screenshot from OSX. Add a unified file menu and you have a carbon copy. Usability innovation seems limited to copying OSX. If not the evidence is still pretty damning, even the lit indicator and popout context boxes are identical.
And for the record I have serious misgivings about holding OSX up as an example of ‘perfect usabilty’. It was pretty decent a decade ago when it was first developed but it has aged and not had any significant overhauls in a long time. It’s by no means terrible but there are better ways of doing a lot of the things that it does and refusing to innovate and instead copy is a missed opportunity.
Oh, and if you’re wondering why the colouring seems so similar in those screenshots, that’s the default wallpaper in Ubuntu (and OSX) displayed. And the window decorations moved to the left, just like OSX, that came in with the new wallpaper. Hmmmm.
Kerberos suggests: “Either nobody had pointed the problem out yet, or just nobody had listened.” I don’t know whether anyone had pointed out the problem, but no-one *credible* had. ESR (a) used his notoriety as a shim for credibility, and (b) used the pattern “If even I couldn’t figure this out, how could anyone else?” The Cups problem was so hilariously bad that improvement was possible without data, but in other cases we need data and don’t have it. As you say, “There is plenty of user feedback coming at FOSS products” — but most of it is useless, because opinions are not data.
Imagine you are an engineer, or even a designer, with eight hours to devote to Ubuntu today. What is the best way of spending that time? Will reading e-mail notifications of new bug reports help you use the rest of your time better enough to make it worth it? Maybe or maybe not, depending on the package. Will commenting on posts on Brainstorm, or Ubuntu Reddit, or OMG Ubuntu, or Piestar help you use the rest of your time better enough to make it worth it? Probably not (though it varies by post, hence me here). Will reading the Ubuntu Forums help you use the rest of your time better enough to make it worth it? Almost certainly not. Forum contributors, if they see a response from a developer, may be reassured or inspired to contribute elsewhere. But that’s an intangible benefit, and unattractive for that reason. That’s why you get told “The developers don’t read these forums”. That’s why Brainstorm acts mainly as a honeypot drawing noise away from the bug tracker. And that’s why it’s gradually getting more difficult to report a bug about Ubuntu. We *need* to erect those barriers, so that we have time left in the day to improve the software. This may seem outrageous to people used to contributing to smaller projects that have less noise — i.e. every open source project in the world, other than Firefox, Ubuntu, and possibly OpenOffice.org.
“Where is usability being discussed?” http://design.canonical.com/ mainly, though there have been some promising discussions on the Ayatana mailing list recently.
Dr Loser: Mark Shuttleworth is a successful businessman, not a UX specialist or technical writer. I don’t claim to know what he means by “persistent awareness of a state”.
The definition of “Ayatana” was originally “stuff that appears around the edges of the screen”, but the scope is (thankfully) broadening. Saying “in terms of usability” or “anti-usability” isn’t meaningful, because usability has several sometimes-opposed aspects.
“Indicators” are unhelpful jargon for “status menus”. The first of these menus shipped in Ubuntu 9.10, and more in 10.04, so they’re not at all “pie in the sky”.
Dr Loser: Mark Shuttleworth is a successful businessman, not a UX specialist or technical writer. I don’t claim to know what he means by “persistent awareness of a state”.
Even business management textbooks say that a good leader needs to articulate. Your leader, on the other hand, is a drunken sailor, and in turn those under him (like yourself) have simply no direction to follow because virtually no one on earth knows what the hell he’s rambling about. And how are you supposed to expect anyone to put trust in Shuttleworth’s organization if he just continues on like this?
I find the last post of Mr. mpt highly intriguing, because it beautifully displays the huge failure that the whole Open Source distributed development system is. ESR called it ‘bazaar model’ and of course wrote some paper about it… and I still can see the smug smile on his face from interviews like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QOoU1MDoVA
The truth however is and always was so obvious, that made you wonder how on earth anyone could possibly believe this bullshit ESR and RMS propagated the last two decades. Of course it doesn’t work if you just take a piece of code from here and there, let hundreds of random people contribute a little bit at this and that and end up with a high quality software.
mpr said:
We *need* to erect those barriers, so that we have time left in the day to improve the software.
No, you don’t need to erect any kind of barriers, you need to follow a basic model of labor division. Get a team who’s job is pure quality assurance and evaluation of user feedback (forget the stupid idea about a ‘community’, because they’re basically just a bunch of complaining freeloaders) and let them be the ones who communicate with the software developers and direct them to the flaws they need to address. Yes, the ‘cathedral model’, ESR be damned.
But I know, that doesn’t work if no one is really responsible and in charge of a software project, since it got developed on the ‘bazaar’. The ones who contributed to it are either busy contributing to other stuff they found more interesting or just completly don’t care, since it is ‘Open Source’ and anyone can make the changes they need… correct?
Wanna hear the cold truth about what FLOSS really is? It is a bless for capitalistic mega companies, because what they do is basically just taking all the effort from you guys and giving it to a well structured, cathedral style organized team and use it for their needs, cutting short of the initial development process and saving alot of money. Yes, FLOSS is everything the FLOSS people don’t want it to be, congratulations.
“I don’t know whether anyone had pointed out the problem, but no-one *credible* had.”
Who decides credible? Am *I* credible? Ultimately the situation is created so the only people deemed credible are the people decided by the people in charge, and who decides if they are credible? Themselves?
It’s also arrogant and stupid in the extreme. You want UX information from non experts as they are your target market, but the only way to give UX feedback is to be a technical expert willing to find and breach all the barriers. You do realise you are getting no useful feedback at all with this system? How on earth can you write software for people if you have no idea of their needs, desires and problems? That’s insane!
Geeraija hits it on the money. You need a team who’s job is to sift through user feedback and decide what is worthwhile and what is not, and what comes up often and what doesn’t. Do it in 3 levels so the first level reads user feedback directly and logs what it is and what its about. The reason for the logging is so that if you look at the numbers and see that 14% of complaints are about CUPS then you know you have a problem there. Anything interesting in terms of ‘data’ (as you like to call it) gets bumped to level 2, who read it and make sure it’s feasible and passes a basic cost/benefit analysis and then bump it to level 3 who put proposals forward to the respective development teams.
Of course I suggested all this in greater detail before but your barriers and ‘honey trap’ work flawlessly, so I guess it never got through.
You said that the Launchpad effort went off the rails despite the best intentions. If that was a closed source project I was doing for a client I would have a look at the process that allowed this situation to happen and endeavour to resolve the mistakes next time, rather than just saying ‘so it goes’. It’s like what Geeraija said, if your developers are personally reading forums and feedback (and thus not coding) you have SERIOUS ISSUES with regards to labour division. You get people who’s job it is to listen to user feedback and due to the unique nature of FOSS you probably don’t even need to pay them. “We want our developers developing” is such a ridiculous cop-out as developers largely shouldn’t be making UX decisions anyway.
A quick side note about WIndows requiring reboot on critical updates.
Technically, Windows can update a binary which is in use, i.e. running. If anyone is interested in the tech details, I can tell a little about it. However, Windows does not want to do that. The reason is simple. Lets have two applications using the same DLL, and it gets replaced in a update. If the second app is started AFTER the update, and the first has already been running, these two will end up using DIFFERENT versions of the same DLL. From that moment on, you can’t rely on good integration between the two apps. Gosh, this can happen for two instances of a single application. Then the second instance will behave differently. This is plainly unacceptable, but fosstards fail to think in such perspective.
@mpt, geeraija, kerberos
Feedback in FLOSS is an interesting question, isn’t it? No prizes for guessing which two of you I firmly side with, but all three of those are interesting POVs.
We on the LHB side of the fence have a tendency to deride the thousands of fanatics who infest blogs and the tech press, mostly repeating the same stale “me too” nonsense. We see this as an irritant to *us* because we have to wade through the mess to get to anything interesting. Obviously, we’re on the side of all that is Holy and Good here.
On the pro-Linux side of the fence, there’s an immense amount of comment along the lines of “Well, why don’t you help fix it?” This is also Holy and Good. Unfortunately, as Kerberos points out, the barriers to help fix it are ridiculously high. I think it’s fair to say that Kerberos knows far more about usability than Mark Shuttleworth — but guess who gets the “vote”?
In a spirit of conciliation, I’m beginning to think that the two attitudes have a lot of overlap. There’s clearly a lot of frustration on both sides.
The problem (I think) is that a Linux “user culture” has developed whereby everybody and his grandmother wants fifteen minutes of fame by mouthing inanities like “Great post! Love the new wallpaper!” With even 1% of the desktop market, that’s a lot of everybodies. I have little doubt that this culture is mirrored in bugzillas, discussion forums, etc.
One might hope for a culture change in Linux users, similar to the culture change he’s looking for in Linux developers. We can all hope. Can’t see it ever happening.
While we wait, geeraija’s suggestion that Linux (desktop division) needs a whole new team concept — you can call it a secretarial pool or a marketing department or whatever — to make sense of the huge amount of redundant stuff in suggestion boxes is really the only way forwards. I’m a developer too, and just like mpt I hate being deluged with this stuff. On the other hand, in real life, we tend to have sane bosses who rarely interfere at the technical level, and sane users who think before opening their mouths. (There’s not much fifteen minutes of fame going on when you’re part of a large private company.) In real life, therefore, the problem doesn’t arise.
If someone were to develop such a Secretariat, hell, even I might contribute as a part of it.
Oh, and @mpt — if you, as a developer at Canonical, can’t make head nor tail of “persistent awareness of a state,” then why on earth (as JoeMonco says) should any of us outsiders give this drivel the slightest bit of credence? It’s not like Jobs calling something “insanely great.” You instinctively know that Jobs doesn’t mean “only operable in a loony bin.” With mission statements like “persistent awareness of a state,” you kinda think there’s a technical explanation behind the explicitly technical terminology. Is there, or is there not?
@mpt, geeraija, kerberos
Feedback in FLOSS is an interesting question, isn’t it? No prizes for guessing which two of you I firmly side with, but all three of those are interesting POVs.
We on the LHB side of the fence have a tendency to deride the thousands of fanatics who infest blogs and the tech press, mostly repeating the same stale “me too” nonsense. We see this as an irritant to *us* because we have to wade through the mess to get to anything interesting. Obviously, we’re on the side of all that is Holy and Good here.
On the pro-Linux side of the fence, there’s an immense amount of comment along the lines of “Well, why don’t you help fix it?” This is also Holy and Good. Unfortunately, as Kerberos points out, the barriers to help fix it are ridiculously high. I think it’s fair to say that Kerberos knows far more about usability than Mark Shuttleworth — but guess who gets the “vote”?
In a spirit of conciliation, I’m beginning to think that the two attitudes have a lot of overlap. There’s clearly a lot of frustration on both sides.
The problem (I think) is that a Linux “user culture” has developed whereby everybody and his grandmother wants fifteen minutes of fame by mouthing inanities like “Great post! Love the new wallpaper!” With even 1% of the desktop market, that’s a lot of everybodies. I have little doubt that this culture is mirrored in bugzillas, discussion forums, etc.
One might hope for a culture change in Linux users, similar to the culture change he’s looking for in Linux developers. We can all hope. Can’t see it ever happening.
While we wait, geeraija’s suggestion that Linux (desktop division) needs a whole new team concept — you can call it a secretarial pool or a marketing department or whatever — to make sense of the huge amount of redundant stuff in suggestion boxes is really the only way forwards. I’m a developer too, and just like mpt I hate being deluged with this stuff. On the other hand, in real life, we tend to have sane bosses who rarely interfere at the technical level, and sane users who think before opening their mouths. (There’s not much fifteen minutes of fame going on when you’re part of a large private company.) In real life, therefore, the problem doesn’t arise.
If someone were to develop such a Secretariat, hell, even I might contribute as a part of it.
Oh, and @mpt — if you, as a developer at Canonical, can’t make head nor tail of “persistent awareness of a state,” then why on earth (as JoeMonco says) should any of us outsiders give this drivel the slightest bit of credence? It’s not like Jobs calling something “insanely great.” You instinctively know that Jobs doesn’t mean “only operable in a loony bin.” With mission statements like “persistent awareness of a state,” you kinda think there’s a technical explanation behind the explicitly technical terminology. Is there, or is there not?
I really need to invest in a new mouse. This is getting ridiculous.
“I really need to invest in a new mouse. This is getting ridiculous.”
Removed the double post. Reminds me of a keyboard I had where only the left side of the spacebar worked, which has conditioned me to that behaviour for good now. I only really noticed when I was looking at wear on one of my newer (working) keyboards to see what I used the most.
P.S. You need one of these:
@The Phenom
True, but windows update is still a piece of shit.
Ooh, ooh, ooh, me *want*!
Does it come with indicators and notifications?
The outstanding OpenOffice.org mouse, the overwhelming manifestation of inability of the FLOSS scene. If I’d own one of those things, I’d remove the buttons and let cress grow out of it.
Kommenter said:
True, but windows update is still a piece of shit.
Might wanna elaborate on how exactly it is shit, or is it just the fact that it comes from Microsoft?
@Kerberos
You kinda wasted that in the middle of comments, didn’t you?
It’s gorgeous. I’m actually surprised that it’s not part of a standing exhibition at the Birmingham Science Museum. After all, they’ve got lots of other loony things there.
@geeraija
Hehehehe no man, Windows 7 user here.
It sucks because there have been multiple times where the updates went like this:
Download
Install a little
Reboot
Install a bit more
Reboot
Updates done
And this is when it works, sometimes the system just gets completely broken (happened with vista, not yet with 7)
Windows also seems to consider rebooting and shutdown to be different things for some unknown reason…
Download
Install a little
Reboot
Install a bit more
Reboot
Updates done
To be honest, I don’t see much of a problem there… updates get installed when I shutdown my computer and installation happens during the boot process when I turn it back on the next day. Mostly I only realize the extra reboot when I come back from the coffee machine and my computer is at the bios bootup again. Not much hassle at least in the way I use my machine.
And this is when it works, sometimes the system just gets completely broken
Never happened to me, seriously. Windows Update is designed to install everything in an virtual environment and only replaces/updates the actual system files when everything was confirmed to be okay. Otherwise the update is skipped and never leaves the virtual environment. In the rare event that it really somehow breaks your system you can still boot in safe-mode and deinstall every recently installed update manually again from the control panel.
Windows also seems to consider rebooting and shutdown to be different things for some unknown reason…
Never experienced that either… it was always equivalent.
WorksForMe(TM)
I can haz teh tradmarkz too? *snicker*
@geeraija
Major WorksForMe you got there :S
And you don’t see a problem with requiring multiple reboots? Can you even come up with an excuse for such behavior? I sure as hell can’t think of one.
@Adam King
No Gay Bestiality BSDM site? I’m disappoint.
Adding to my comment, the system getting broken is actually very rare (much more than on linux, happened only once for me in vista, but I know people that suffered worse)
Update failure is quite common though… too much in fact (not once on 7, but lots of times on vista).
There seems to have been a .Net framework 4 update problem on 7, but I already had it installed so it WorkedForMe™.
And the shutdown thing… One example I can think of is:
You know that shield that appears next to the restart button? Well if you choose shutdown instead, they don’t get installed!
And you don’t see a problem with requiring multiple reboots? Can you even come up with an excuse for such behavior? I sure as hell can’t think of one.
Component dependencies, updates requiring previous updates being installed and running to be applied… who cares? If it bothers you so much, ask on technet.
If in 2 1/2 half years of using Vista and almost a year of Win7 no single update has ever failed, then a WorksForMe™ is good enough.
You know that shield that appears next to the restart button? Well if you choose shutdown instead, they don’t get installed!
Yes I know that icon. On my machine, it installs pending updates before shutting down. Everytime. WorksForMe™.
Usually what happens to me is:
Install update (50%+ of the time this is the end of it)
Reboot (once or twice a month)
Finish installing the update when Windows starts (pretty rare once you’re fully updated)
I think shutdown and reboot not being equivalent is because you could easily miss out step 3. What actually happens during an update that requires all 3, but after step 2 you instead start up into safe mode?
I’d never had an update failure though, until that .NET4 update. And I ran Vista for about 18 months at one point. Apparently if you download that update manually it says it’s only for Itanium systems, but I have a Q9550 on this machine.
Yeah, I can’t really think of the last time Windows required multiple reboots to install the latest updates. Are you not updating once a week on “Patch Tuesday”?
@TMR
“Yeah, I can’t really think of the last time Windows required multiple reboots to install the latest updates. Are you not updating once a week on “Patch Tuesday”?”
Try reinstalling vista…
@Kyle
“I think shutdown and reboot not being equivalent is because you could easily miss out step 3. What actually happens during an update that requires all 3, but after step 2 you instead start up into safe mode?”
Did not think of that… But you can still go into safe mode when you reboot so it’s unlikely.
@geeraija
“Component dependencies, updates requiring previous updates being installed and running to be applied…”
That bull must have had some nice beans man… cuz that’s some damn good bullshit right there.
“Yes I know that icon. On my machine, it installs pending updates before shutting down. Everytime. WorksForMe™.”
On 7 it has worked correctly so far, so i’m assuming it was a bug that was fixed.
And again, WorksForMe™ is not a valid answer, just because the LY use it to death doesn’t mean you get a free pass to do it too.
Still, some pretty bullshit updates happen on Mac OSX too, stuff that really should not require a reboot does for some unexplainable reason (other than the software being more intertwined with the OS than it should), at least it tells you right away if it’s needed, and it reboots ONCE.
@Kommentor
This might help you with the .NET 4 update problems.
On top of that, try and make sure you have at least 1.5GB of hard disk space available and have your anti-virus program shut down (since many anti-virus programs can cause tonnes of Windows Update hiccups that are otherwise nonexistent in the same environment) before you proceed with the update.
Kommenter said:
That bull must have had some nice beans man… cuz that’s some damn good bullshit right there.
And again, WorksForMe™ is not a valid answer, just because the LY use it to death doesn’t mean you get a free pass to do it too.
Yes, it means exactly that, because I don’t give a crap about the attitudes of the LHB trolls that think they’ve become witty after hanging out for months in the comment sections of blogspot.
On 7 it has worked correctly so far, so i’m assuming it was a bug that was fixed.
Yeah right, now it’s a bug that got fixed and never happend. In the previous posts you claimed to be using Win7 and that there’s a difference between those two actions. No wonder you know so much about bullshit.
@Kommenter
Component and update version dependencies are indeed there. Updates come separate, and you can install / uninstall them separately. Well, this convenience has its tradeoffs. MS has determined that these tradeoffs are acceptable, and judjing from the low number of complains, they are right. End users seldomly care. Corporate environments care even less, as there updates are administered.
As for update errors, well, shit happens. It might be faulty update package, faulty driver or application, or even faulty hardware. It might be even a power glitch during the update. You cannot protect against every possible fault.
The point is that I personally fail to see how Windows update is shit, when it gets the job done nicely for 95% + of the setups out there.
I find it amusing that people bash Windows for randomly restarting due to updates when they don’t want it to when this is a decision by Microsoft to put *security* ahead of *usability*. Sure it’s annoying but it makes sure that everyone is patched – if you just wait until people apply them themselves it’ll never happen and you’ll have lots of vulnerable PC’s out there. After all it’s easy to change …
I only use Windows occasionally (read under once a month) through a VM on my Mac and I’ll say it: Windows Update makes me batty. It’ll easily take me an extra half-hour with every session to get the latest updates, that is, if I don’t get frustrated and just ignore them before doing what I need to do. I realize it’s a difficult problem to solve, especially when you have weekly updates, bit it can be really trying.
For instance, in my old MacBook, which I use less and less these days (27″ iMac FTW), I can boot it up after more than 2 months of leaving it off (this is a true story) and it’ll show me all my system updates. If my hotel room has shitty speed, despite the claims and paying extra for faster (thanks, Westin), and I can just get some of the camera updates and a security patch but but not the full 10.6.3 update, no worries. When I get home and use my laptop in bed and find that 10.6.4 is now out, my update now switches to the delta of 10.6.4 that includes 10.6.3. I can download and update and let it reboot two or three times (and it warns me that will happen) and run updates in an automated and fast nature. I don’t have to check for new updates after each initial update/reboot.I agree, for daily users it’s not as bad but if you’ve got a machine you only travel with, prepare to dedicate at least 30-45 minutes for each update session. And expect at least one error that is impossible to get easy access to without copying the cryptic code and then plugging it into th Windoes help database and possibly having to download a tool to fix.
I won’t argue Linux is better, you get the joy of dependency hell there, but I do think Mac OS X has it nailed.
As for the broader discussion of the problems getting people to listen in the FOSS community, I think MPT pioneered that entire argument 8 years ago. While I don’t think Shuttleworth knows usability or interface better than average wannabe UX expert (and I’ll suck it up and admit I fall into that category — though I’ve attended like 6 UX seminars in the last 2 years and have friends that ARE usability experts and that have created some great usability testing tools for the places/apps that get shit right, which in actuality probably only makes me more dangerous, though I always defer to experts), at least he’s had the foresight to hire someone like MPT.
The problem of course, is that one person or a small team is not enough to overhaul an entire project, especially if stuff wasn’t even a consideration for the first 4 years of the project.
Not to mention all the issues with Upstream. In other words: Desktop Linux UX is a clusterfuck.
Someone points out a flaw with winders and you winbreds jump on him and start yelling WorksForMe(TM). Do you seriously expect anyone to believe that you’re not paid shills for the illegal monopoly?
@JoeMonco
Thanks but I didn’t have problems with it, I had the .Net Framework 4 installed before the update. If anyone here did then that should be helpfull thanks, I know the techsnap guy did, at least I think it was him.
@geeraija
“Yeah right, now it’s a bug that got fixed and never happend. In the previous posts you claimed to be using Win7 and that there’s a difference between those two actions. No wonder you know so much about bullshit.”
It happened on vista, I had problems on vista, I said clearly I didn’t have these problems on 7 yet, lrn2read.
All I had on 7 were multiple reboots.
(PS: in case you haven’t noticed you rabid MS fanboy, I like 7).
@The Phenom
“Component and update version dependencies are indeed there. Updates come separate, and you can install / uninstall them separately”
I know they are there, but it’s not an excuse for multiple reboots (components shouldn’t have to be running for others to get replaced, that doesn’t even make sense).
“As for update errors, well, shit happens. It might be faulty update package, faulty driver or application, or even faulty hardware”
It’s a faulty update package.
@Christina
Yeah they are nice on Mac OSX but not perfect, not a problem with the updater though but with the applications themselves.
@Kerberos
“I find it amusing that people bash Windows for randomly restarting due to updates when they don’t want it to when this is a decision by Microsoft to put *security* ahead of *usability*”
I don’t mind that really, I understand the need for it, but even that is poorly designed, they come out of nowhere with that 10 second message and particularly enjoy doing it while i’m playing games fullscreen…
I of course switched to download but not install updates, which solves that problem.
Kommenter said:
It happened on vista, I had problems on vista, I said clearly I didn’t have these problems on 7 yet, lrn2read.
All I had on 7 were multiple reboots.
I need to ‘lrn2read’ because you have no idea what you were arguing about in your previous posts? Are you mentally challenged or is this just a weaseling out tactic now?
You said:
Windows also seems to consider rebooting and shutdown to be different things for some unknown reason…
And the shutdown thing… One example I can think of is:
You know that shield that appears next to the restart button? Well if you choose shutdown instead, they don’t get installed!
And then, all of the sudden it’s just a problem you had under Vista? You had your problems with broken updates under Vista, that’s all you’ve said. Are we done now discussing on the loony bin level or do you want to throw some more TMs at me?
@Christina Warren
I believe you fail to understand that Windows gets many more updates that Mac OS X does. The huge hardware base, and application range, plus being a target of more security attacks make it so. That’s the way it is. If you use Windows seldomly, and updates are so annoying, you can disable automatic updates and manually update your system when you feel fit, and then select the updates you need and want.
@Kommenter,
I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. There are core components which are always running and used by almost every other part, like the kernel executive with its many subparts, OLE and RPC to name a few.
@The Phenom
“I think you have no idea what you’re talking about. There are core components which are always running and used by almost every other part, like the kernel executive with its many subparts, OLE and RPC to name a few.”
Yes… and this means that multiple reboots are necessary because? What other system needs this and why does windows?
Look I know there are dependencies among updates, That does not excuse multiple reboots, what is it about the windows design that prevents it from simply installing all the updates and then rebooting?
@geeraija
“And then, all of the sudden it’s just a problem you had under Vista? You had your problems with broken updates under Vista, that’s all you’ve said. Are we done now discussing on the loony bin level or do you want to throw some more TMs at me?”
1. I’m not a freetard and don’t put me in the same basket as those idiots.
2. I’d expect rabid defensiveness from freetards/mactards, not windows users.
3. I only threw one TM at you because… well you used it, repeatedly (Shame on you).
I never had the problem on 7, and I never said I did. On 7 all i had were multiple reboots, I didn’t even have the .net framework problem because I already had it installed. (Doesn’t mean other people didn’t, understand how that works? and why WorksForMe exists?).
Also about the shutdown thing, considering it has worked for you and on 7 it has not caused me that problem yet, I just naturally assume there was a bugfix.
Notice how I said:
“Update failure is quite common though… too much in fact (not once on 7, but lots of times on vista).”
Right before that, selective reading much?.
“Look I know there are dependencies among updates, That does not excuse multiple reboots, what is it about the windows design that prevents it from simply installing all the updates and then rebooting?”
Agreed. The system is shutting down so it should be as simple as moving the entire dependency chain into place at once to be picked up on the next reboot.
Funnily last time a Safari update came out it forced me to restart. I do agree with the multiple reboots on patching being annoying – however just as FOSS evangelists run detailed metrics on ‘shutdown time’ its simply not a big enough deal to spend time and resources on when there are more important things that need to be done. The FOSS approach of creating exotic schemes so that you can patch without ever rebooting (that are never used by mainstream distros anyway) is akin to dusting your shelves despite someone having taken a dump on your carpet.
@Kerberos
“The FOSS approach of creating exotic schemes so that you can patch without ever rebooting (that are never used by mainstream distros anyway) is akin to dusting your shelves despite someone having taken a dump on your carpet.”
Oh god… not that thing, I’d rather have multiple reboots than system like that, that thing is just asking for some major fuck up.
Multiple reboots are annoying from a user perspective. It pisses me of more from a “why the hell is it like this” perspective.
“While I don’t think Shuttleworth knows usability or interface better than average wannabe UX expert[...] at least he’s had the foresight to hire someone like MPT.”
I don’t know anything about your buddies or your qualifications, lady, but to put it bluntly, I think it would be absolutely insane for anyone to give MPT’s job application even just a moment of consideration. As someone with a job position that had something to do with “user experience” (or what the saner part of the world called “being an analyst” – and I am using the term “user experience pretty loosely here), your time would certainly be better spent gathering as much information as possible from those expecting to use your software to achieve something (or what, again, the saner part of the world called “stakeholders”) and translate the unintelligible to details that could be implemented by the programmers. Bug reports are supposed to be for those who have more or less a firm idea about the expected behaviors of the software (i.e. the tech support) to read, not those who are supposed to have jack squat to do with this sort of things. In other words, if MPT is really part of Ubuntu’s design team, then he is certainly wasting all his work hours doing what is ultimately irrelevant to his job position. Either that, or he is just trying his best to evade what has been given him as part of his duties.
As far as I can see, there has not yet been one single thing spoken by this “MPT” fellow that does not fall into the category of “contemptible”, and either this guy is a damned good troll, or it’s time for Shuttleworth to put Ubuntu out to grass.
Kommenter said:
Notice how I said:
“Update failure is quite common though… too much in fact (not once on 7, but lots of times on vista).”
Right before that, selective reading much?.
Good Lord, we’re down to coherent sentence structuring now? The level has dropped from loony bin to elementary school… okay, whatever:
1) What you’ve wrote in brackets clearly refers to the part of the sentence that precedes them. You even put the period to end the sentence after the brackets. That means, that “not once on 7, but lots of times on vista” refers to your problems with failing updates.
2) Later in that same post you said “And the shutdown thing… One example I can think of is[...]“, which clearly refers to an earlier post and has NO logical connection to what you’ve written in the brackets earlier in that post. So, now lets have a look at the post which this is referring to:
It sucks because there have been multiple times where the updates went like this:
[...]
And this is when it works, sometimes the system just gets completely broken (happened with vista, not yet with 7)
Windows also seems to consider rebooting and shutdown to be different things for some unknown reason…
2.1) Again, your problems with Vista in that post refer to the “system gets completely broken” after an system update. In the next sentence, which this is all about, you state “Windows also seems to consider rebooting and shutdown to be different things “. There’s no reference to Vista nor 7 here, which implied that you mean both versions with that statement.
Selectively reading my ass. Express what you wanna say in coherent sentences and you may get your point across. And since nobody, including me, is interested where this stupid discussion is going next, I’ll leave it with that.
While I will admit my structure was not the best (not a native english speaker and shit at my main language as well), you just interpreted it the way that was convenient for you and irrelevant to the discussion, I just mentioned windows 7 in that original post because so far I have very few complaints about it and threw it a “bone” so to speak, good software deserves praise.
It’s irrelevant which version I was talking about, you asked me why I though windows update sucked and I gave you plenty of reasons you chose to ignore with multiple WorksForMe statements and insults, looking for “loopholes” in my hastily written posts, the fact that the .Net Framework problem occurred to other people tells me microsoft as yet to completely fix this mess.
Well at least this discussion brought something good, more activity here at piestar, even if it was oftopic.
@JoeMonco
As I said, I think MPT has a point — although I don’t think he’s considered the ramifications (Kerberos’ response made a huge amount of sense). The signal-to-noise ratio on Linux blogs/bug reports/user forums/suggestion boxes is shameful. Not at all surprising, but shameful. Given that fact, I wouldn’t expect a development unit to spend much more than the first two weeks, bushy-tailed and bright-eyed, period spending any time at all considering this guff.
The upstream/downstream dichotomy doesn’t help at all. It’s wholly arbitrary and like pushing on a length of elastic.
I think I’ve got Kerberos right in saying that you *obviously* need a dedicated (part-time, just for fun, but dedicated as in they don’t mess with any other part of the system) group to filter this out in the standard 1st/2nd/3rd tier support way — except, not support, but design/feature recommendation.
There are two problems with this: nobody with the money to get it done, like Shuttleworth, is going to see it as ego-food (he’s a fool. It would be), and there are precious few people out there who would volunteer. *I* would volunteer. I just don’t see it happening.
@Kommenter:
Without having a clue as to the mechanisms, I suspect that the multiple reboot thing on Windows updates is due to the application of “known state.” There’s just too much hardware out there. There’s just too much software. Most of it is broken and incompatible, in various ways.
If I were Microsoft, I would stage each update to go from Known State (Initial) to Known State (Intermediate) … and eventually to Known State (Final).
It’s hard enough testing all this crap *without* imposing limiting points, which presumably correspond to fairly strong boundaries such as kernel/services/gui/user space.
I’ve seen a lot of this stuff on the Net, and frankly (not from you) it looks like a bunch of whiny kids. The young lady who has a problem with updates in a VM on a mac is, albeit not whiny, fairly typical. Get over it! It’s just a VM! Either bring it up a little more often, or download the freaking stuff without installing and leave the damn thing over a coffee break every now and again!
@JoeMonco
FWIW, MPT is presumably Matthew Thomas: https://launchpad.net/~mpt. Seems to be a Kiwi living in London (does Canonical actually employ anybody other than tax advisers in the Isle of Man?) with three extraordinarily silly bugzilla reports under his name.
Matthew, if you’re reading this:
#386196: Tell them to fuck off. What a stupid suggestion. Non-geeks don’t care (and in fact will google for the package name) and geeks won’t care either.
#530751: Tell them to fuck off. What a stupid suggestion. The phrase “battery discharge” is intelligible to anybody whose brain can cope with the idea of two rocks being bashed together.
#475773: Tell them to fuck off. What a stupid suggestion. The solution to this one is for Canonical (or any other Linux distro) to offer people a short list of what they want (based on digg, for all I care) rather than EightMillionApplications(TM). Categorisation won’t cut it. It’s not the friggin Dewey Decimal System, you know.
Now, Matthew. Did you listen to all that stuff about getting usability and user input sorted? Do us all a favour; do Shuttlecock a favour; get it sorted out.
Just because you’re being paid by a Benevolent Dictator doesn’t mean you have to kow-tow to him.
“I’ve seen a lot of this stuff on the Net, and frankly (not from you) it looks like a bunch of whiny kids”
I probably came across as a whiny kid to be honest, windows update pissed me a lot when I was on vista, and getting bombarded with WorksForMe didn’t help the situation. Still, this isn’t the sort of “debate” i’d usually insist on so much, my fail there.
Your answer about incompatibilities is probably the reason, microsoft doesn’t really know for sure if the update will work on a certain hardware configuration so might as well replace a little, reboot, and then continue.
“The signal-to-noise ratio on Linux blogs/bug reports/user forums/suggestion boxes is shameful. Not at all surprising, but shameful. Given that fact, I wouldn’t expect a development unit to spend much more than the first two weeks, bushy-tailed and bright-eyed, period spending any time at all considering this guff.”
Yeah it’s not somewhere en engineer/designer should be wasting time, that he even considered it to be what kerberos was suggesting indicates a problem.
@Kommenter:
Well, see, I’ve done this update stuff for twenty years or more. Normally on million dollar systems (with multi-million dollar penalties — have I mentioned the time we nearly took down CompuServe, *for ever*?).
I go easy on professional software engineering teams who’ve gone through a proper testing schedule. I don’t care how many steps it takes. It’s an over-used phrase, but I Feel Their Pain. Very few professionals, in my experience (let alone users, who could care less), consider the concept of roll-back. It’s quite important.
By the by, there’s nothing wrong with your English. I’d take a vague guess at your native language being Dutch/Flemish, simply because I’ve not seen a German construct yet.
My second language is Gibberish. I speak it fluently. I’m actually working on a one-to-one mapping with J2EE … there are some semantic constraints that I haven’t got around to yet.
“My second language is Gibberish. I speak it fluently. I’m actually working on a one-to-one mapping with J2EE … there are some semantic constraints that I haven’t got around to yet.”
Might wanna look into ANTLR, awesome tool for describing grammars
.
Been there, done that.
Haven’t quite worked it around to gibberish, yet. Have you looked at the awesome http://www.cs.usfca.edu/~parrt/papers/mvc.templates.pdf yet?
Did not know that paper, the fact that there are still problems separating content from presentation is kinda sad.
Dr. Loser,
I’ll be the first to admit my Windows usage is what makes the software update process painful, when I used to use Windows full-time my habits were different and when I was a computer repair tech in college I’d roll my eyes at people like me who waited too long too. However, that’s sort of my point, from a usability angle. The longer and more complex and more likely to fail the update process is, the less likely people update. Which is why I have to fix my dad’s computer every few months because he gets impatient. Even a more accurate downloader or the ability to download subsequent updates after the reboot would be better. It’s the elongated process that drives me nuts. But yes, my general complaint is trivial, but I do think it is indicative of the average user and this could be improved.
If any of you haven’t read MPT’s Why FOSS Projects Have Poor Usability or whatever, read it, because it affirms every point Kerberos’s points quite well. Of course, the fact that even if you know what to avoid and how to go about doing things the “right” way results in utter failure, well I think that’s an interesting lesson and likely indicative of inefficient leadership or a really out of control project.
I don’t envy any company that is trying to put on the open face, only to realize all the tards are mucking shit up. But then, that’s why I would never try to build a commercial company by trying to turn fosstards into consumers.
In my view, if you want to leverage “open” and make it profitable, you need to either go after the business customer who is willing to pay for support and who likes or wants some of the benefits of the stack (see Red Hat, SugarCRM) or you’ve got to build off of the open but not pander to the overall community and instead target paying customers from the word go. Like Apple or Google. No, Apple isn’t open in the traditional sense but WebKit is a pretty well run project. WebKit doesn’t fuck around. Plus, Apple and Google will hire the community members that do good work. Hence how the two guys who started Camino (the native OS X build of Gecko that existed before Safari and way before Firefox finally went Cocoa) now work for Apple and Google respectively (ironically now both on WebKit, Pinkerton headed up the Chrome for Mac team).
But if you start off catering to the unwashed masses of foss users who will never pay you a dime anyway, you totally set yourself up for a shitty situation in trying to make something look professional.
The signal-to-noise ratio on Linux blogs/bug reports/user forums/suggestion boxes is shameful. Not at all surprising, but shameful.
The bug report mechanism is supposed to be there to provide details in regards to unexpected behaviors observed in the software. It is simply not a place to hold the “next big thing” for designers or to serve as an IT version version of Hyde Park for anyone with two fists and keyboard. #386196, #530751 and #475773 are simply not bug reports – they are high-level ideas that designers are supposed to figure out on their own. In fact, it is supposed to be their job to come up with all the high-level ideas – not the blasting users’. Outside the insane asylum, the users only come into the picture when they are approached with specific questions in regards to what they expect from the software. Damn volunteers. Damn Brainstorm. If you are finding yourself deluged with random thoughts blurted out by the users, then, most certainly, you have already failed to conduct proper requirements elicitations.
Then again, I wonder if anyone inside Canonical actually understands how Ubuntu is supposed to work in the first place.
If any of you haven’t read MPT’s Why FOSS Projects Have Poor Usability or whatever, read it, because it affirms every point Kerberos’s points quite well.
That’s a shame. Did he get the memo about whom he was actually working for, or was he just too busy being a hypocrite?
“If any of you haven’t read MPT’s Why FOSS Projects Have Poor Usability or whatever, read it, because it affirms every point Kerberos’s points quite well.”
It’s true. It’s also fairly surprising and confusing that he would then actively promote a honeypot to draw away user feedback so it can all be more efficiently ignored:
“That’s why Brainstorm acts mainly as a honeypot drawing noise away from the bug tracker. And that’s why it’s gradually getting more difficult to report a bug about Ubuntu. We *need* to erect those barriers, so that we have time left in the day to improve the software.”
The problem with the current ‘usability experts’ is they think it’s all about user testing, but that is putting the cart way before the horse. You need a plan, you need to implement that plan then you need to be happy with your implementation, *then* you start user testing. User testing half-baked rubbish which is unplanned and cobbled together rubbish is pointless as generally user testing will only tell you (very roughly) what’s wrong, not how to fix it. If your ideas suck, or your implementation sucks, then no amount of user testing will help.
@Kommenter
It’s not that there are problems separating M,V and C. (There are — they’re called human beings.) It is, after all, an academic paper (although Terrence is bloody good at getting academic stuff into the mainstream, as per ANTLR).
The interesting thing is how disparate the MVC achievements of various “industry standard” frameworks are in meeting their supposed goal. This shouldn’t be a surprise; you only have to look at ASP or vanilla PHP to realise that a lot of websites fail miserably at separation of concerns. And why not? They work. For a while. In a way.
It would be a particularly useful paper for architects and managers choosing a templating language, because it does at least offer a set of criteria to judge between them. Unsurprisingly enough, I’ve never met an architect or a manager who’s even heard of the bloody thing.
@Kommenter
It’s not that there are problems separating M,V and C. (There are — they’re called human beings.) It is, after all, an academic paper (although Terrence is bloody good at getting academic stuff into the mainstream, as per ANTLR).
The interesting thing is how disparate the MVC achievements of various “industry standard” frameworks are in meeting their supposed goal. This shouldn’t be a surprise; you only have to look at ASP or vanilla PHP to realise that a lot of websites fail miserably at separation of concerns. And why not? They work. For a while. In a way.
It would be a particularly useful paper for architects and managers choosing a templating language, because it does at least offer a set of criteria to judge between them. Unsurprisingly enough, I’ve never met an architect or a manager who’s even heard of the bloody thing.
Here’s the truth about MPT – he’s been bought.
I can sit here and declare that the problems are still there, that I’ve been waiting a decade for them to be fixed and that I don’t care what they say about project X that is going to claim to fix them all – I am simply not buying it. Nothing bad will happen to me except some hate mail by fanboys. I have my opinion and I am sticking to it and I like to think I have evidence on my side.
MPT on the other hand is now paid by Canonical, he works on what he’s told to work on and I have no doubt is making a positive impact, but as the saying goes it’s just rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic. He is in no position to say to Mark (who appears to be a fairly strong character) “You’re doing it all wrong” as no doubt this would probably jeopardise his job.
The changes which I feel are necessary* involve a significant investment in terms of time, effort, manpower and a reassessment of priorities. I think Mark is failing in what is required to fix Bug #1 and I can say this as publicly and tactlessly as I like without worry, an option that MPT no longer has.
* Do I feel I am right enough to risk my job over them? Do I stand behind them to that degree? Who knows? I certainly wouldn’t say that I would.
Maybe I was skimming too quickly, but the only concrete suggestion I’ve seen here is from geeraija: “Get a team who’s [sic] job is pure quality assurance and evaluation of user feedback”. You’ll be pleased to know that we already have a dedicated QA team, and we have people who do user research. They are not the same people, because they’re completely different jobs.
Joe Monco: I love you too.
Kerberos: No, you’re not credible yet, because you don’t have a body of work to point to (or if you do, you’re keeping it quiet). And no, it’s not correct that “You want UX information from non experts as they are your target market, but the only way to give UX feedback is to be a technical expert willing to find and breach all the barriers.” Useful UX feedback comes from user tests and ethnographic research, which is what we do.
I’ve already had my period of criticizing software developers “publicly and tactlessly”. It lasted from 1999 to 2001 or so. It was great fun, and occasionally I relapse, but for the most part I’ve moved on to more effective tactics. Best of luck with yours.
“Useful UX feedback comes from user tests and ethnographic research, which is what we do.”
No offence but I have entirely lost faith in the open source movement when it comes to usability. There have been grand claims about how usability is being put at the forefront for the better part of a decade yet the only thing I have ever witnessed happen is the changing of theme and the addition of gimmicks with no effort to fix the inefficient layout and usability problems with Gnome, not that you can actually really do anything anyway as the brunt of the issues lie upstream.
I’ve said it before ad nauseum but your problem (and Ubuntu’s) is a total failure to listen to your users. Is there any effort to identify why people choose not to use Ubuntu? Is there any effort where people can report problems they have (that isn’t a bug tracker) so you can collate the top N issues? Has there been any honest efforts to solicit opinion or engage the community?
Essentially ‘deeds not words’ and to be perfectly frank the FOSS community has used up all its words and is still blaming the near flat growth curve on everything from hardware manufacturers, OEM’s, Microsoft’s evil hand and inertia yet never stops to consider that the reason people aren’t using it may have something to do with needs and requirements.
Us: “Hey, we here don’t use Ubuntu as it doesn’t fit our needs, let us tell you why!”
You: “Shut up, you haven’t proved yourself worthy to give feedback.”
Fantastic!
“Kerberos: No, you’re not credible yet, because you don’t have a body of work to point to”
I can’t cook, but I know a bad meal when I eat one. It’s also in the chef’s and restaurant’s best interest to listen if I bother to complain.
But if it was in the Ubuntu restaurant, you say I need a Michelin star or be Gordon Ramsay before I can complain to the chef?