2009/6/16 Vincenzo Ciancia
<ciancia@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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.
I wouldn't want to lower the value of any observations you've made, as long as these are observations about other people's behavior and not about your own behavior, tastes or preferences. This is the reason why I was asking Scott to produce some explicit evidence, because, so far, I have the impression he's mostly speaking based on his own feelings. I may be wrong about this, of course.
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.
I believe you that you and Scott are not the only guys who hate this feature. Still, the problem with saying "there are 20 people in Launchpad who hate it too" is that all of you conform a self-selected sample. If you hate the feature, you report it as a bug in Launchpad or get noisy about it in the mailing lists. If, on the other hand, you like the feature, or, at least, don't have a problem with it, you normally don't write to the mailing list just to praise it. Do you write to the mailing list every time you like something about Ubuntu?
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 risk of such a poll is the same: Self selection. Obviously, people are much more likely to participate if the are bothered by the feature, which will immediately introduce a strong bias. Although I'm a scientist, I'm not an expert in this kind of research, so I guess I'll ask my poll-designing colleagues here at work what they would do in such a situation and see if they have a better answer.
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.
You are speaking about pop-ups here, but the update notifier is rather a "pop-under". It remains discretely behind other windows until you select it. The only way it can be intrusive, as you already pointed out, is by getting in your way when you're trying to switch windows with Alt+Tab. In any case, I agree with you that we don't know if the new solution is any more or less effective than the previous solution.
> 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.
Achieving a less disturbing system is, of course, a valuable goal. The problem here is that if your system is, for example, running an insecure network stack or a file system module that may destroy all of your data, you'd rather be disturbed about it. My hunch is that the pop-under will be more effective at calling most people's attention in such a case, but, of course, I don't have hard data to prove it.
> 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?
Scientifically, it proves nothing. I mentioned it only to show that personal hunches my be wrong, and that you have to look at the wider picture if you want to make a good design decision.
> . 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.
I'm starting to wonder if we are speaking about the same piece of software. In my case, the pop-under remains quietly in the background. I can ignore it for as long as I need. I was never forced by my system to apply updates when I didn't want to. Am I missing something here?
[...]
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.
This sounds great. We seem to have enough scientists here to run a small University, and still don't manage to get our act together and try some actual usability studies. I'm not an expert either, but we surely can learn.
Cheers,
M. S.