Re: [Ayatana] Getting users to care (was Re: [Fwd: Re: Update manager])

[Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Il giorno mar, 16/06/2009 alle 17.17 +0200, Martín Soto ha scritto:
>         
> 
> Would you mind showing us some evidence of said "overwhelmingly
> negatively" reaction?
>  From what I've seen on the mailing lists so far, those complaining
> about the update pop-under mostly belong to a small, yet very vocal
> group of power users. 

Please, let's keep the "this is something that only power user
like/dislike" old argument out of this discussion. I see this is not
your intention, but as we are all power users this is an effective
dialectic technique to lower the value of our observations.

Also, I already said this elsewhere. Either design a poll, or don't say
that a group of persons is small. You don't have a scale for comparison.
The whole launchpad can be considered a small group of users. Ubuntu
developers are a small group of users.

If you think you "didn't see the numbers yet" and want people to start
an advertising campaign to send angry users that may not have the will
to report the bug here, I can do that (yes it's a joke). 

Let me also remark that the bug had some 20 duplicates. These are
persons that _did not know_ the problem before and went to report. Hence
they don't belong to a "small group" as you said. I am one of these.

Now let's get to the point of which evidence we have that people do not
like popups in general. For update-notification, if you want evidence,
again, create a poll and find a way to gather the opinion of users. I
won't do that because I already have good experience.

The typical computer user I saw in my life tend to close immediately any
popup without reading it. Especially if it's not a good moment to do
what is requested. This is my experience, I teached ubuntu to many, and
I taught courses at university to non-computer scientists, (I was forced
at the time to use windows, and here I could have a good sample of
behaviours w.r.t. popups) but I am not an usability expert. 

If you accept my past experience as an example, my impression is that if
a non-power-user sees a popup requesting to do an action and it's not
the right moment, she closes the popup. After a while, closing the popup
becomes an habit. And it's never used again, it's just considered an
annoyance. If doing upgrades was a "do it in 5 seconds, and be sure not
to have consequences" kind of thing, probably users would learn to just
click ok instead of closing the window. But it's not the case.

> Power users are often adamant about having absolute control over their
> computers,

This is NOT the case in the problem we are talking about. We want a
cleaner, less disturbing system. We are not asking for esotheric feature
or millimetric customization. I even reject the solution of editing the
appropriate gconf key quite because, even if I know how to customize my
system down to the bare hardware, I _prefer_ to use the standard
settings of ubuntu. Sometimes I don't even change my background for a
long time after a new installation.

>  so it is no surprise that some of them find it very irritating when
> their computers open windows without their explicit consent. I'm not
> sure, however, that this is the case for most users (myself included,
> and I'm  a power user, for sure)

So you are a power user too, you don't feel irritated by the pop-up, and
this proves what?

> . I would expect most people to just confirm the updates and keep
> going with their lives

Are you saying that you really NEVER experienced an upgrade that creates
a problem? I use my computer to work. Sometimes I just can't afford the
risk that the thing breaks, even in minor aspects. E.g. when I am
preparing a presentation or I am under a deadline. For this reasons the
popup cannot be that frequent, it'd be annoying to people like me.

But this creates a time-window for worms. If any. 

> , but, as I said, if you have clear evidence that contradicts my
> expectation, I'll be glad to see it.
> 

Clear evidence will be obtained only when studies will be published. All
of this **** is based on a study which has not been published. I do not
work in usability and do not have the resources to do a test, but if you
find any, and you need some cooperation, I'll be glad to help designing
some experiments.

Vincenzo