Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[drago01]

On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 7:03 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 18:34 +0200, drago01 wrote:
>> On Tue, Oct 12, 2010 at 6:30 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
>> > On Tue, 2010-10-12 at 10:53 -0400, Neal Becker wrote:
>> >
>> >> I don't agree.  There's nothing unusual about a dumbed-down interface for
>> >> novices, with an 'advanced' tab hiding more options.
>> >
>> > As someone else has pointed out, a lot of usability experts consider
>> > this a bad idea, for two reasons:
>> >
>> > 1) everyone thinks they're an expert, even if they're not, and hits
>> > 'advanced'
>> >
>> > 2) it creates a confusing decision point for *everyone*: how do you know
>> > if you need the 'advanced' options? You can't really know without
>> > looking at them, so you have to look at them to decide if you need them,
>> > so essentially we're presenting the advanced options to everyone...
>>
>> Well most people just press "Next", "Next", "Next" ....
>
> As I recall, several distros have done usability studies and found that
> this isn't actually true. People have been *trained* to just press next,
> next, next under specific circumstances - like Windows software
> installation - but it's not everyone's default behaviour, especially the
> kinds of people who tend to install Linux distributions.

Any pointers to those studies?
Not saying that you are lying, but I am actually interested to see them.

> (Have you ever
> observed people trying to use subway ticket machines in an unfamiliar
> city? They certainly don't just click next, next, next, in my
> experience. They read every screen carefully and worry which of the many
> options to choose. Frequently, when the process is too complex, they
> worry that they've somehow got something wrong, cancel, and start
> over.)

It involves money ;)

> Even when people do it, it's more of an 'exasperation fallback': it's
> what people do when they hit their breaking point of potential
> decisions, they go 'oh what the hell, I'll just hit next on everything'.
> If we get to that point we've already 'lost', because we exasperated the
> user: even if they happen to get a fully functional install, they're not
> happy with the experience.

Or they think "don't care, just install the damn thing".