Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Adam Williamson]

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. (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.) 

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.

It'd be nice if anyone who's been involved in Fedora UX studies could
contribute...
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net