GUADEC Usability Hackfest

This wordy entry is largely cribbed from an email I sent last week, and is to introduce to you the first-ever GUADEC usability hackfest. If you are at GUADEC, please come and help us make GNOME more usable!

A picture of Robert Love

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.

It is amazing to watch the ways that people fall on their face. We’ve all read about the benefits of usability testing, but until you actually try to sit still through two hours of these videos, it isn’t a visceral experience for you. It is exciting, and totally emotionally exhausting. You squirm. And it focuses you like a laser.

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.

Anna Dirks will be airing much of this video at toady’s hackfest at GUADEC, during her talk before lunch. We will also be publishing a lot of it online as soon as we get all the participants to finish signing release waivers. We’re also thinking about providing funding for more of these usability labs so that other people can do this testing themselves. The video talk will be followed by a hackfest, so people who want to work on improving the desktop we have, instead of engaging in an open-ended “GNOME 3″ discussion, have a place to go.

You can read more about the hackfest on the wiki page.