In response to two paper cuts, “Have the file-roller automatically extract an archive on double click” and “‘Archive Manager’ doesn’t mean anything if you don’t know what an ‘archive’ is”, the Canonical Design Team devised a user test of archive behavior in Ubuntu, and we’re inviting the community to help administer the test and collect user data. From the test specification wiki page,
We’d like everyone to help us discover the optimum solution to the archive problems mentioned above. This is the first time we’re trying user testing as a broad community activity. Please bear with us if the process is not perfect and let us know your thoughts and feedback on how the process can be adjusted or improved. Please use the Answers section of the project for your feedback.
The way we plan to find the optimum solution is to collectively conduct research to gather data, which we can then analyse and base our decisions on. This data collected will be analysed centrally by the team at Canonical. Findings and recommendations will be reported after the data has been analysed.
User testing is often fun and rewarding, and it’s a great way to gain valuable perspective from everyday users of the software we love to work on. If you’d like to help collect data on how people use and understand archives in Ubuntu, please start by reading the test specification, then get testing!
Edit: Please do not post your suggestions for how archives should behave. The purpose of this experiment is to gather data in a prescribed, uniform manner and base our decisions on that. If you want to help, please read the test specification and gather user data; please do not post your opinions here.
10 comments
The optimal behavior IMO is to treat archives just as a normal directory, and should be managed directly by Nautilus instead of the additional archive manager application…
I don’t know what the optimal solution is, exactly, but I do know what it is not: exposing the concept of ‘archive’ to the user in any way. Archives are merely a workaround for technological limitations (too little space, too hard to transfer a whole folder in one shot, etc.). They are part of the underlying implementation. But the user should not have to care about such issues that are clearly not relevant to the task of actually getting to his content. Ideally, if something needs to be expanded or archived, it should all happen automatically, leaving the user in “ignorant” bliss. If I want to mail a folder, it should automatically be archived without me realizing that it’s ‘compressed’. If there’s a file-size restriction somewhere, the file should be compressed as well—but appear completely normally to the user.
This is not a simple issue to fix. It requires rewriting a lot of software. A lot. The more I think about it, the more complicated it seems. But, in an ideal world, the contents of an archive is all one would ever see, and the concept of ‘archive’ would be as hidden as the kernel.
I’d also like to point out that there are quite a number of computing concepts that should have been restricted to the underlying implementation but completely hidden from users: e-mail attachments (the distinction between those and inline content is meaningless to people), folders, and applications (an inhumane concept I blame Apple for widely popularizing as an ideal computing paradigm). If we can slowly chip away at these relics of interfaces that are thin veneers over their underlying implementations, Ubuntu really will be for human beings.
what if the archive that is to be expanded automatically requires a password?
Very, very cool. It’s great to see you guys figuring out how to apply open source structures to the hard work of usability.
Thanks for what you’re doing–keep up the good work.
Of course, if you do change it to hide the concept of an archive, all the people who *do* know what an archive is will be struggle to work out how to create one.
Simon: I don’t think so. You can *still* have a right click menu entry to create an archive when you select folder/s and files.
I don’t think there is much user testing needed here as i have seen it often enough with my parents and other people: They are absolutely puzzled by the concept of an archive.
That said, +1 to the first comment. Handling archives should be completely transparent, which means handling an archive as a folder when i double click it.
Handling archives transparently is how Windows Explorer handles zipped files if you dont have third party tools installed (if i remember correctly).
How about non-english-speaking users? will the test videos still help you guys get relevant data out of them? Will cultural factors play a role to some extent? And how, if I may, will you guys tackle that?
Although I think having a broad, international, multi-cultural testers can help in producing a wider spectrum of result data, I fear we’ll end up with a “good enough” solution that involves some compromises to a certain degree.
Similar to what translators sometimes encounter when trying to come up with a “good enough” term in their language to describe a functionality that was ad-hoc defined in the first place by the english-speaking developer.
But that was yesterday. Today we enter distributed user testing. Hooray.
I think what you guys are doing here is good. More than good. It’s great. Finally a pragmatic approach to usability. Now that’s real progress.
It’ll indeed be a fun discovery. Can’t wait for the results!
Apologies for off topic. David, on twitter you say “MonoDevelop has excellent Python support thanks to a plugin”. Can you please point to the plugin, or how to install it? After lots of googling it’s still unclear. Thanks!
He might mean http://www.mono-project.com/Python
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