After working on paper cuts for a year, I realized how disorganized many open source projects affecting Ubuntu are when it comes to improving user experience. I would often go to upstream projects with a list of paper cuts to discuss and have a very difficult time finding someone to discuss them with. Either the maintainer was too busy, or nobody was interested in small user experience issues, or “the mailing list made that [design decision],” or there was no record justifying the existing user experience so project stakeholders assumed they were deliberate decisions made by the original authors, etc.
We simply cannot go on like this! We need to be able to address user experience issues at least as effectively as we address technical issues, and this starts with being able to communicate about these issues at least as effectively. If I discover a user experience issue in F-Spot, there should be exactly one person I can discuss it with, who will take responsibility for keeping an eye on it, and who will discuss and prioritize it with F-Spot’s development team. This person would be F-Spot’s User Experience Advocate, and everyone working on F-Spot would have this person on speed dial.
The User Experience Advocate is responsible for representing the interests of users within an open source project, and has the following specific duties:
- Review usability and user research documents.
- Communicate user experience research to the project team.
- Review use cases if they are available or produce them if they don’t exist.
- Review software against user experience guidelines, usability heuristics and brand.
- Work closely with the maintainer and advise on solutions that are most aligned with users needs and findings.
- Conduct usability testing or other research to support the project team’s decision making.
- Write and follow usability bug reports throughout the lifecycle of the project.
- Work closely with UX Advocates on related projects.
- Participate in the greater user experience community.
Where do we find people with these skills, you ask? We already have them! To be a UX Advocate, you don’t need to be able to create pixel-perfect mockups in Inkscape or have an HCI degree. All you need is love–you have to love an open source project and the people who use it, and you need to be patient, persistent, and persuasive. Of course, if you have some background in user experience, that would be tremendously helpful, but it’s unnecessary; it’s far better for an open source project to have a novice UX Advocate than none at all.
Many open source projects already have people serving in this capacity; sometimes it’s the project maintainer, or sometimes there’s a de facto usability expert. My goal is to ensure that all major software projects shipping in Ubuntu can name their UX Advocate by this coming October. I would be delighted if the same happens for Kubuntu, or for any arbitrary open source software project for that matter. In my opinion, if an open source project has a Maintainer, it should also have a UX Advocate.
In his keynote address at O’Reilly Open Source Convention on July 22nd, 2008, Mark Shuttleworth challenged the open source community to not only to catch up to Apple in terms of user experience, but to surpass the user experience of Mac OS X within two years. That two year period will expire in 45 days, so how are we doing?
(Before people start complaining about this comparison, let me make it clear that I understand that many Ubuntu users are not interested in Apple or any of their products, and that many members of the open source community do not share the goal of making Ubuntu’s user experience surpass that of Mac OS X. That’s fine, I understand. I am writing this because it is my duty to make the experience of using Ubuntu better than the experience of using any similar product, and because Ubuntu and Mac OS X, as desktop operating systems, are similar products, it is my duty to make the experience of using Ubuntu better than the experience of using Mac OS X. I cannot accomplish this effectively without comparing the two, but I digress.)
It is an incredibly daunting task to compare the total user experience of Ubuntu to the total user experience of Mac OS X, so instead I will attempt a cursory comparison the rate of change of user experience over the course of the last two years. Any objective critic will readily admit that the Ubuntu of two years ago, Ubuntu 8.04, did not offer the same or better user experience as the Mac OS X of two years ago, Mac OS X 10.5. To trump the user experience of Mac OS X, Ubuntu’s user experience will necessarily have had to improve more in two years than Mac OS X did.
Ubuntu, two years ago.
Here’s how the user experience of Ubuntu has improved in two years:
- The Ubuntu Software Center made it a snap to discover and install software.
- The Humanity icon theme gave us much improved, scalable icons.
- The Radiance and Ambiance themes made Ubuntu more beautiful.
- The Me Menu lets you Tweet, Dent, and change status from anywhere.
- The Messaging Menu consolidated new message notifcations.
- The Session Menu made fast user switching and other session states more accessible.
- PiTiVi Video Editor enabled video editing out of the box.
- Brasero made burning CDs much simpler.
- Empathy enabled video and audio chat on supported hardware.
- Gwibber Social Client brought Facebook, Twitter, and other social services to the desktop.
- Monochromatic panel icons reduced visual noise and made the panel feel cleaner.
- Improved window animations and effects made Ubuntu feel snappier and smoother.
- Simple Scan made scanning a no-brainer.
- The Ubuntu One Music Store puts a huge library of DRM-free music at your fingertips.
- Rhythmbox added fantastic iPod and iPhone support.
- We fixed 178 Paper Cuts.
- When you start or shut down, there is less flickering.
- Ubuntu boots very very quickly.
- Encrypted Home Folders keep your files extremely secure.
- Ubuntu One keeps your files synchronized across multiple computers and the web.
- Bluetooth Setup greatly simplifies working with Bluetooth devices.
- The Installer slideshow gives a slick overview of the Ubuntu experience.
- USB Startup Disk Creator saves time, hassle, and CDs!
- Notify OSD presents uniform, unobstrusive notifications.
- Sudoku!
- Firefox 3 brought private browsing, improved UI, better security, more speed, improved audio, video, and web fonts.
- Transmission BitTorrent Client makes downloading large files very pleasant.
- Easier configuration of multiple displays.
- Much refined installer, including a nicer time zone selector.
- Ability to enable auto-login.
- Tomboy Notes sync puts your notes on all of your computers and the web.
- OpenOffice.org v3 brought many new features and improvements.
- PulseAudio gives us better sound control for multiple devices.
- Improved out-of-the-box experience for users of Nvidia drivers.
- Mobile Broadband support lets you easily connect to the Internet via your mobile phone.
- BBC and YouTube support in Movie Player.
- Guest Account makes it easier to share your computer.
- Fast User Switching.
- Improved user account management.
- Evolution with Exchange MAPI support (not just OWA).
- Plug-and-Play printing enabled by automatic printer driver installation.
- Notification of USB device removal (i.e. “you can unplug now”).
- PDF comment support.
- F-Spot duplicate photo detection.
- Improved WINE integration.
- Autorun for media containing software.
- Tabs in Nautilus.
- Desktop background slideshows.
- And of course, improved hardware support so more things Just Work.
Now I’d like you take a look at the improvements Apple made to Mac OS X in a two year period. Please visit that link and read at least the bold text, if not the entire page.
At the very least, can we not say that these improvements are comparable? I think they are. Of course there have been some regressions, but if someone would have shown me the list of improvements made to Ubuntu two years ago, and told me that all of these changes would be made in time for Ubuntu 10.04, I would have been very skeptical.
What will Ubuntu be like two years from now if every project assigns a UX Advocate to take ultimate responsibility for the user experience of that project? It will be amazing!
28 comments
Presumably this is a just a re-announcement of what the GNOME community have already said they’re going to do?
http://live.gnome.org/GUADEC/2010/BOFs/UserExperienceAdvocates
Or are we going to end up with half a dozen different UX Advocate programmes that will just confuse everyone?
Numpty, this is not a re-announcement or a fork. What you’re linking to is part of the very same UX Adovates project that I began discussing at UDS. You’ve rightly pointed out that these are one and the same project.
@numpty how elaborated! :)
Regardless who had this great idea first, which no one could never had, I presume the advocate can be the same ;)
Do you know of a similar page that shows all the improvements between Windows Vista and Windows 7? It’d be nice to see how our improvements compare to theirs.
The only problem I see, is that the list between 8.04 LTS and 10.04 LTS is that a lot of those improvement are things already available in Mac OS X and have been for some time. I’m talking other than the obvious “iPod support”, which, really, is not Ubuntu/Linux’s fault.
-”PiTiVi Video Editor enabled video editing out of the box.”
-”Brasero made burning CDs much simpler.”
-”OpenOffice.org v3 brought many new features and improvements.”
-”F-Spot duplicate photo detection.” — Apple has software that detects faces of invidiuals and tags them appropriately…
-”Autorun for media containing software.”
-”Desktop background slideshows.”
All of these are available in Mac OS X and Windows… Plus many more.
Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu and will use it for a long time to come, but we are still playing catchup. I see you guys are starting to innovate, but Mark really should have said 5 years, for version 13.04 (codename R—- R—-) before Ubuntu is parallel (in some major, but not all forms) to Mac or Windows…
My most dreadful suspicions confirmed.
Hi David, what application support PDF comments compatible with Adobe Reader in other platforms ? Last time I checked only Okular would do that but only be readable by other Okular products.
You may also want to revise technical details of some items in that list, for example BitTorrent doesn’t automatically apply to any large file. Such details may get in the way of keeping focus on the UX issues you aim at.
Perhaps also group improvements related to Canonical services, as those are not of much use in upstream discussions where such products are not the focus of development – AFAIK.
“Enhancements and refinements”
That is the objetive.
Ubuntu has to feel simple, easy, and fast. Great to focus on that!
@Fabian Rodriguez
Evince can read and modify annotations [1] and the support for creating new ones is on the way.
[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168304
@Brett
So what? A lot of the Mac items have been available in Ubuntu for a long time. For instance:
“Restore deleted items to original folders.”
“Support for
Microsoft Exchange.”
“Automatic spelling correction”
“Automatic time zone setting”
Also, your OpenOffice point is invalid – unless Microsoft has started shipping OpenOffice with Windows 7 and I never noticed.
This is not going to be a rant but, could you list one point that came out of the Ubuntu community and was not just developed upstream and Ubuntu uses it?
I sometimes have the slight feeling that Ubuntu isn’t doing much of the upstream work.
And even if an UX advocate is of course not a bad idea – who will do the work to fix things?
What a coincidence :-)
I said almost exactly the same a couple of days ago (I called it the design maintainer): http://weblog.savanne.be/199-a-tale-about-design-part-two
@Johannes
Sure.
Tomboy Notes sync puts your notes on all of your computers and the web.
The Ubuntu Software Center made it a snap to discover and install software.
The Humanity icon theme gave us much improved, scalable icons.
The Radiance and Ambiance themes made Ubuntu more beautiful.
The Me Menu lets you Tweet, Dent, and change status from anywhere.
The Messaging Menu consolidated new message notifcations.
The Session Menu made fast user switching and other session states more accessible.
And of course, improved hardware support so more things Just Work.
Simple Scan made scanning a no-brainer.
The Ubuntu One Music Store puts a huge library of DRM-free music at your fingertips.
Ubuntu boots very very quickly.
And I don’t believe that’s all of them.
One point, thanks to cautious launcher the user experience of wine on Ubuntu has got much, much worse over the last 2 years (i.e. since Karmic).
Well, I am a user. Have been for 10 years in Linux, Kubuntu, Ubuntu, Mint etc. This effort is the main reason Linux is still less than 1% of software used. Go for it David. It will make Linux better.!!
Where is the one stop for UX complaints about notify-OSD? I’m constantly amazed that anyone making their living in the field of HCI would put a rather large notification bubble that has no easy way of dismissal, but a rather pointless, though showy, transparency-on-hover.
I’m not blaming you, but sometimes I read things by “Canonical” and it forces me to break that scab.
It’s too bad, really, since that was, IMHO, the only really obviously bad choice (on the interface side) I’ve noticed in Ubuntu over the last few years.
BTW, I wouldn’t tout Software Center just yet. It really offers very little over Synaptic, BUT with the simple change of allowing users to queue changes, rather than one change at a time, it would become a very nice addition to even a techie’s desk.
the 100 paper cut sessions are great and especially for F-Spot where quite a few issues fixed in the lucid cycle. Too bad that all these changes did not make it into the F-Spot version incorporated into Lucid as they where released with f-spot 0.6.2 on 14 May 2010 :-(
http://git.gnome.org/browse/f-spot/tree/NEWS
@liam: I would guess here: https://launchpad.net/notify-osd
Yes, Tom’s quite right about the Wine user experience regression.
I’d call myself the Wine user experience advocate. While I blame cautious launcher on the Security team, I’m moving forward to make it not suck in Maverick.
@Jay – It has been made clear that there will be no deviation from the design doc (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines). Part of the doc is that certain events (like power or network events) are not dismissible. Supposedly this is based upon the freedesk.org notification standard (http://www.galago-project.org/specs/notification/0.9/x408.html#signals) but when I read it I saw no mention of preventing users from dismissing a bubble, and in the url I just gave you can see they included a signal that lets the user dismiss the bubble. All I want is for Notify-OSD to include that feature in all of it’s bubbles. Basically, that conclusion of the design doc is flawed (IMHO), and until Mark allows his designers to make the necessary changes, Ubuntu’s (not the proposed notification standard put forward by canonical that may/not be accepted by Gnome) OSD won’t change. Thanks though:)
@Liam Probably it would be better to change the theming of the bubbles to make them not feel “solid”. Then hopefully users will understand that they aren’t supposed to be dismissable.
(There are advantages to not being dismissable; I think the design team did the right thing, they just need to get a few implementation details right.)
Wow, someone here can’t take *valid* criticism. You can try to sugarcoat it as much as you want. Ubuntu is just not up to par compared with Mac OS X. The unified core user experience in that other OS is directly related to the fact that Apple controls all aspects of its OS. Your little “education process” is not going to help in that aspect now or ever.
If you want to make a truly great Ubuntu, tell Shuttleworth to pack in more money, fork everything that is central to Ubuntu and go on from there.
Needless to say, I am an Ubuntu user. And it’s sad to see how Canonical tries to run it into the ground with every new version. Mediocrity reigns. (Oh, I am also a Mac OS X and Windows 7 user. Just so you aren’t confused that this comment is not written on Ubuntu.)
TheComrade, I deleted your first comment because it was one of the most negative comments I’ve ever read, and you only listed snide rhetorical questions and offered no suggestions. If you don’t want to support this project, that’s fine, but I really don’t appreciate the negative energy.
I certainly agree that Ubuntu currently does not offer user experience on par with Mac OS X, and I’m sorry if I gave that impression. I do however think that Ubuntu can compete with OS X in this respect, and although total control of all aspects is how Apple does it, I think there’s a better and more practical way for Ubuntu to achieve great user experience that doesn’t require installing a Leviathan. My hope is that this little “education process” will help the open source community discover 1,000 Steve Jobs and give them a voice. This way, the Canonical design team and I can focus on the “core OS experience” as you call it, and UX Advocates can focus on the applications and other components.
By the way, this project caught the eye of OpenUsability.org, who are running a Summer of Usability program. This program pays HCI students $1,000 to contribute to an open source project over the summer. After discussions with the head of the Summer of Usability project, we agreed to join forces so that this summer, open source projects looking for UX Advocates can be paired with paid graduate students in HCI. Say what you will, but that sounds like it will have a positive impact on Ubuntu UX.
@Dieki
Having a VERY few items be non-dismissible is fine, but as the primary/only way to give notifications , it is terrible. Theming won’t help with this particular problem. The ability to dismiss must be included.
Having non-dismissible bubbles telling me that “Paranoid Android” is playing is bad. Having the same type of bubble appear when my battery is at some configured, critical percentage is better.
You want such notifications for things that require user response, not just for any bit of status change that gets sent into dbus, seemingly.
BTW, @Brett, this is the first thing I found when I was looking for the Mac’s face recognition accuracy. Implementing facial detection, with subsequent differentiation of faces, can be done without much/any novel work (I believe it was Berkeley who demonstrated a program that recognized low-res faces nearly 100% a few years ago), getting it to work well, not so easy, as Apple found out.
I’d like to be a UX Advocate. How can I get involved?
je, please add your information here: http://openetherpad.org/uxadvocates
Just a very, little tiny detail, Evince does not support pdf annotations/comments (at least evince 2.30.3).
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