Ubuntu 10.10's installer looks rather nice

[Dennis Jacobfeuerborn]

On 10/14/2010 06:32 PM, Lars Seipel wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 October 2010 15:56:02 Dennis Jacobfeuerborn wrote:
>> Now we are really talking semantics. The point is that users should not be
>> confronted with choices they don't really need to make or they don't
>> understand.
>
> I disagree. How should a user know about some nice feature if its whole
> existence is hidden from his eyes? Yeah, he should read the documentation but
> aren't we talking about improving usability right now? Imagine some random
> user does his installs the hard way for years and now discovers (someone tells
> him oder he learns about it by chance by searching the documentation for an
> unrelated problem) that Anaconda has the capabilities to make his life easier.
>
> He goes like: "Woow cool, this is the stuff I've been searching for years. I
> don't have to waste my precious time anymore by setting all of this up by
> hand. Anaconda now takes care of it. Didn't thought those Anaconda developers
> are that genious. But why on earth didn't they tell me before their software
> was capable of doing that? Do they actually like watching people suffer?
> Seriously, you guys suck!"

Yet most of this can be done in a much better way *after* the installation. 
I'm not sure why you think cramming as many features as possible into 
anaconda is a good idea. Once you've got the desktop running you have way 
better means to advertise features to the user.

> Hiding features doesn't have to be beneficial to usability. It can be harmful,
> too.

Clearly if we wanted to hide *everything* we would not require a user 
interface at all but some choices need to be made. The point is that a lot 
of the stuff you apparently have in mind don't actually need to happen 
during the installation but can happen for example as part of the 
first-boot configuration.

>> As long as most of these defaults and menus are not displayed initially
>> that would probably be fine.
>> The problem here is that every time you present the user with data dumps
>> (e.g. lists of defaults) or menus you create a cognitive hurdle where the
>> user wonders what he's supposed to do or gets worried that he breaks
>> something. Minimizing that is really key to creating a streamlined
>> installation interface.
>
> There are other ways to prevent confusion and worries about potential
> brokenness. If there are sane defaults and it is clearly communicated to the
> user that using those is the recommended way and gives him the best results in
> most cases, I don't see a problem. If users can trust in those defaults being
> sane and that by not touching them they get a good default configuration, they
> aren't helpless as they know what to do. However, if they wish to change
> something in future attempts they already know where they have to look.
>
>> new installed system. The user doesn't care at all about "partitions",
>> "LVM" or "mountpoints".
>
> I think you are strongly limiting the definition of what an user can be. So who
> is an user of Anaconda? For me, that is all those people using Anaconda. There
> is some guy from your neighborhood installing Fedora to surf the internet.
> There is some developer installing Fedora to work on the latest and greatest
> software in the GNU/Linux/X/freedesktop.org stack. There are designers using
> Anaconda to install the free software they need to create your favorite
> layout. There are also sysadmins deploying Fedora/RHEL/CentOS to many
> computers in their company, a public school or at your ISP's datacenter. So
> when you restrict Anaconda's userbase to just one kind of user, the whole
> assumption on which you build your enhancements to usability is wrong and will
> lead to software which sucks in usability as soon as you want to do something
> that you didn't consider basic enough to show it to users.

The problem is that you insist on cramming all these people into one single 
group and create an installer that will make everyone happy. That's just 
not going to happen and it's one of the primary reason why efforts to 
improve things often fail. While abstraction is good there is such a thing 
as too much of it.

One perfect example is the idea that you can simply slap a traditional 
desktop on one of these new tablets or smartphones and you are done. The 
real genius behind what Apple accomplished wasn't some nifty technological 
feat or the fact that they control both hardware and software but that they 
recognized that these devices simply aren't traditional desktop PCs and as 
a result need a system that is tailored to this new world rather than 
simply rebranding StandardOS(tm) and putting that on there.

I think what is needed here is a similar approach were we don't try to take 
the current installation process and put some lipstick on it but instead 
recognize that the needs of Joe Sixpack who doesn't care about technology 
but simply want to share YouTube videos, manage his photos and browse 
Facebook are different from Mr. Admin who worries how he can separate his 
/home partition from the rest of the system to make fresh installs easier 
and wants to use a bridge setup so he can access his virtual machines from 
elsewhere.

I simply don't find the idea that we must bother Joe Sixpack with all these 
options simply because we *must* have a single installer that work for 
everyone very appealing because it makes innovation much harder.

Regards,
   Dennis