A picture of Robert Love

It is amazing to watch the ways that people fall on their face. We've all read about the benefits of usability testing, but until you actually try to sit still through two hours of these videos, it isn't a visceral experience for you. It is exciting, and totally emotionally exhausting. You squirm. And it focuses you like a laser.

For example, we asked a lady to send mail to a friend. Against all odds, she started Evolution (nothing in the menus indicates that it's a mail program; something we hadn't realized before but which was immediately obvious after watching her stalk one-by-one through the menu items muttering to herself along the way).

The correct next step would have been for her to click on the "New" button that's in the upper-left-hand corner of the window. This button didn't even register for her, however. Instead, because she wanted to "send" a mail, she clicked repeatedly on the "Send" part of the "Send / Receive" button just to the right. For about a minute.

Anna Dirks will be airing much of this video at toady's hackfest at GUADEC, during her talk before lunch. We will also be publishing a lot of it online as soon as we get all the participants to finish signing release waivers. We're also thinking about providing funding for more of these usability labs so that other people can do this testing themselves. The video talk will be followed by a hackfest, so people who want to work on improving the desktop we have, instead of engaging in an open-ended "GNOME 3" discussion, have a place to go.

You can read more about the hackfest on the wiki page. New Linux desktop software 28 May 2005 16:30 CEST Jeff Waugh has just arrived in Stuttgart fresh from his eight-leg trip from Sydney, and just pointed me at the SymphonyOS desktop mockups. This is one of the most exciting sets of desktop mockups I've seen in a long time. I've been spending some time thinking about basic desktop layout recently and these ideas are pretty cool.

Jeff also told me about Thunar, a very nice simple file manager being written by some of the Xfce guys.

Also, Thunar provides browser-style navigation, which I think is a lot more usable than the spatial mode that Nautilus uses.

Jeff seemed pretty excited about this; I got the feeling Ubuntu would be switching to Thunar pretty shortly! If Red Hat and Sun follow, our hand will be forced. Welcome to the stud farm 28 May 2005 13:01 CEST Previous visits to IBM's incredibly boring facilities near Stuttgart combined with reports that the city was almost entirely levelled by the allies during the war to lower my expectations to IM Pei levels of shitty modern architecture and East St. Louis levels of urban splendor. I wasn't expecting much from Stuttgart this year. But this seems to be a very nice city.

Check out how awesome this park is!

Stuttgart is famous for its many 13-point buck/decapitated amputee torso statues

There is a massive ex-Turkish population here, and shoarma is available everywhere.

I don't know how faithful this telling of the story is to actual fact, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Stuttgart means "stud farm."

I loved reading Matthew Thomas's list of usability issues he encountered in Ubuntu because it drew attention to the things those of us in the Linux desktop community would rather forget. Though we like to focus on new horizons like desktop search and 3d acceleration (I certainly do), there's still shit lying in the backyard that someone needs to to clean up. Checked out the sound properties dialog in GNOME lately? There's not as much glory in being a pooper scooper, but maybe there should be. We could make t-shirts.

So, the biggest issue for GNOME and KDE isn't a strategic one. It's an execution problem. We've got to get better at finishing what we've started.

(I hope I'm not being a downer or anything, on the eve of GUADEC.)

Time Travel

Brain Activity

Mike Shaver recently recommended I read Delivered From Distraction, a book about adult ADD.

It arrived today, along with about fifty other things that had accumulated in my Amazon shopping cart (a new Gore Vidal book, some Manu Chao CDs I already owned, Marathon Training for Dummies, a chess strategy book, a toy airplane). I cracked it open and skipped directly to the self-assessment quiz on page 45.

The first question was, "Did you turn directly to this quiz before reading the other parts of this book?"

The next question wasn't, "Did you receive twelve other books on disparate subjects with which you've already lost interest and a toy airplane along with this book?" But it might as well have been.

Running

I started running a few weeks ago as a way of keeping the urge to smoke at bay. The theory being that you can't just stop smoking, you have to adjust all the other parts of your life such that smoking doesn't make sense anymore. You essentially have to become a different person, a person who would never smoke.

So I've been running three or four times a week, and I'm up to about an hour a run. Yesterday was my longest continuous run so far, at a little over nine miles (in an underwhelming but not totally pathetic 1:20). My shins hurt today.

Last night, I ordered a super-cool wrist-mounted GPS to show me how far and fast I'm running. All the benefits of a treadmill without the massive suck-factor of going to the gym and contracting foot diseases in the bathroom.

Last week was spent in Europe, and running was much more fun there. The little towns of Ede (in Holland) and Bad Homburg (in Germany) had very accessible parks and forests through which to run. Dirt trails are a lot gentler on the joints than sidewalks.

In Bad Homburg, which is not as good as Good Homburg

"Bad" in German means "bath," and Bad Homburg is an old European spa town; a place you'd visit to recooperate from serious illness or decades of too much sausage and beer. Like in Der Zauberberg, but without the mountain and the long expositions on Humanism.

Sort of sinister