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  • #21
    Originally posted by curaga View Post
    It doesn't matter what the Usability Studies (tm) say, if the new workflow is worse for Me (tm).

    It's not resistance of change, it's resistance of change to a worse situation.
    In other words, you are agreeing with me strongly. What matters to many users is whether a new UI fits into their workflow or not.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by RahulSundaram View Post
      It wasn't a red herring at all. Adoption just naturally follows ease of use typically and when organizations fund usability studies, adoption is precisely the end goal of the move but since Linux users tend to be more technical and have adopted the UI for a specific workflow, they tend to be resistent towards any sort of new UI even if usability studies shows that it works better in general.

      In the case of GNOME 2.x, there was massive amount of flameworks and forks before things settled down with incremental improvemens in subsequent versions. I expect some of that pattern will repeat itself for GNOME 3.x which does have several professional UI experts involved.
      To be clear, I meant red herring in the sense of changing the subject. You made with a provocative, but non sequitur, statement (i.e., that b/c Unity had usability testing, and they don't seem to have had much additional adoption, therefore usability tests don't help adoption --- I wasn't arguing about any of those points, and, moreover, it is clearly not a logically sound position, thus provocative and non sequitur).
      I certainly wouldn't argue that the end goal of usability, from an investment perspective, is to increase adoption, but, necessarily, usability only relates directly to ease of use. Yeah, it's pedantic, but I wanted to be clear what I was attempting to say.
      To the best of my knowledge, none of the main designers have formally trained in the hci field (john, jakob, owen, allan, cosimo, or jasper), but I certainly could be wrong (not that it alters my point about usability testing, however, which can be done cheaply --- at the autumn summit in boston there was talk of putting together a testing suite since nearly all the tools already exist in foss. However, you still need someone to actually write the tests and conduct them, and that is one of the things that requires serious knowledge and skill.
      I'm not going to address your view of linux users tending to be more technical since that would, again, lead to off-topic areas.
      I'm aware, though not intimately, of the early period of gnome 2.x, but things are a good bit different today. For one thing, the UI is so much more different from 2, than 2 was to 1 (in case you don't remember me, I have no problem with some of the major changes, but it simply can't be reasonably argued that the design was robust enough to handle more than a single monitor, or that it works well with more than a couple open applications). Two, Miguel has completely left Gnome. Three, we're now approaching the fifth release of gnome and things don't seem to be improving. With regards to the last point, I am in particular concerned about the reluctance of the developers to set hooks into the shell for extension. I am of the firm belief, and I know John doesn't like them, that the reason GS is doing as well as it is almost solely due to the ability to extend it. It's almost like going back to sawfish, except with a vastly lower bar of entry, and more possibilities, but, like they've done with themes, you can't break extensions each release and expect people to keep re-writing them forever. One of the most talented designers that created Gnome themes has already stopped updating his themes b/c of this issue, and there was at least one extension writer who seems to have done the same.
      I'm not saying any of these things are easy but the can be accomplished but it requires much more openness, and much more willingness to treat with others, than has hitherto been the case, and blogging is not a substitute. That is not a meeting of equals.

      Originally posted by danielnez1 View Post
      Depending on how studies are set up (number of participants, participant selection etc.), they can be a useful as a chocolate teapot, especially if its set up to get the answers you want to hear, not what you ought to hear.
      This is the dance I was speaking of, Rahul. It is a tricky thing to accomplish. Not only being willing to hear these things, but knowing precisely both what you want to test and how to test to test it.
      Last edited by liam; 05 May 2013, 03:10 AM.

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      • #23
        Hi

        Many of the usability designers are self taught just like many of the best programmers in Linux and it can be done quite successfully but it isn't true that none of them have the background to do it.

        Also, comparing GNOME 3.0 to 3.8, it is very hard to argue that there isn't major improvements. GNOME Shell extensions have "hooks" just fine and in fact can change *anything* in the shell. The work done to provide better defined and documented entry points as well as extensions.gnome.org has helped. There were posts expressing valid concerns about the nature of extensions from several releases back but many of them have been addressed. For instance, GNOME classic mode is just a bunch of supported extensions and there is a feature in the next release to auto-update extensions on demand which should help with breakage. So the project continues to evolve and address the issues cited here.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by garegin View Post
          this is not surprising. many linux enthusiasts do not use linux as their main machine. therefore, linux is just a part time plaything, they are not taking the desktop linux seriously.
          Nope, that applies only to you.

          Originally posted by garegin View Post
          it's the same way with BSD, but there the devs never had an agenda to overtake Windows, so their usage of Mac/Windows is open and without pretension.
          Nope, its because Linux has much bigger marketshare and is actually relevant.

          Had BSD bigger marketshare in any area, it would immediately be attacked by windumbs. But this will never happen.
          Because first thing they had done is of course copy-paste all BSD technology (if any?nevermind.) to overcome it technologically. BSD is not protected from this by license, unlike Linux.

          But keep on trolling, windumbs fanboi.

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