http://nat.org/2005/may/#GUADEC-Usability-Hackfest
Over the last several months we at Novell have sent a team of people around the world with a portable usability testing lab: two video cameras — one on the face, one on the hands — and a frame grabber, recording everything the user does. We ask our subjects to perform five or six simple tasks with GNOME and burn the result to a DVD.
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For example, we asked a lady to send mail to a friend. Against all odds, she started Evolution (nothing in the menus indicates that it's a mail program; something we hadn't realized before but which was immediately obvious after watching her stalk one-by-one through the menu items muttering to herself along the way).
The correct next step would have been for her to click on the "New" button that's in the upper-left-hand corner of the window. This button didn't even register for her, however. Instead, because she wanted to "send" a mail, she clicked repeatedly on the "Send" part of the "Send / Receive" button just to the right. For about a minute.
This is easy to fix; we just need to change the labels to be more sensible (and then test again on 5-6 people to make sure we changed them appropriately). It was interesting to watch this video and instantly realize that the "Send / Receive" button is all about how Evolution works and not about what the user wants to do. I've been staring at that button for five years, and never realized it was wrong until I saw that video.
ok. non sono cinque anni ma sono pur sempre quasi due che uso evolution, più volte al giorno tutti i giorni, e non avevo mai fatto caso al pulsante "Nuovo" e al pulsante "Invia / Ricevi" e al fatto che la loro funzione non è poi così ovvia
bene o male uso i pc da 14 anni e sono passato attraverso molte interfacce grafiche (all'inizio l'interfaccia grafica non c'era proprio), e fino a poche ore fa tutti questi discorsi sull'usabilità mi sembravano un po' campati in aria... non ne sono troppo sicuro, adesso
PS. per chi ha seguito il thread su xfce e i wm leggeri... guardate di che si parla qui