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!

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.

Thanks for what you’re doing–keep up the good work.

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.