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My dad vs. Ubuntu - A lesson in end user experience

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Fast forward to some saturday evening after this. The phone rings while I'm myself working on some blog post, my dad on the line. Unfortunately his own update experience was not quite as good as my own, or at least it seemed so, so he would tell me in his usual diplomatic style that this OS is "some pile of bullshit" (of course in german with adequately powerful swear words). Judging from his words the system now would be a better toaster, completely useless for anyone, as any functionality of any importance just stopped working.

Normally this would have me jump into the car at an instant and trying to solve those issues directly on site, which unfortunately was not possible this time as I had some other appointment this evening. So I had to leave my dad with this "steaming heap of ...", you get the idea, until next day, silently cursing myself to ever get myself in the frontline that way.

The next day. I booted dads computer. Login prompt, login, everything ok. The system shows the desktop just as usual. A little subdued my father told me that most issues "magicly disappeared" over night. Asking him to explain what had happened yesterday a little more precisely he came up with the following:

My dad: Network stopped working in Lucid

What happened:


While updating to Lucid Lynx the Network Manager stops working at some time, saying that it cannot continue while the system is updated.  This however is only a temporary issue while the system installs the update and is gone on next boot. Hardly understanding what was said in the english dialog - my dad speaks some english, but was unable to correctly interpret the real nature of this message - he thought this was some "real" error message and the network was now permanently lost.

My dad: Lucid has dropped support for Bluetooth

What happened:


At the end of the installation the system shows a list of "discontinued packages" which would now be removed. One of these packages is called "bluetooth". Of course this does not mean dropped Bluetooth support but that this implementation now is obsolete and is replaced by some other package.

My dad knows nuffin' about packages, left alone how to judge what these package names are about. So removing a package named "bluetooth" would in his eyes mean "No more bluetooth for you, man!".

My dad: Lucid fails to detect my monitor/graphics card correctly

What happened:


My dad has a computer with an NVIDIA graphics card using the restricted driver. When starting the normal GNOME screen resolution tool on this system it, well, tries to tell you that this graphics driver offers a special configuration tool and that the normal tool is not usable. This dialog is translated to german, but it's sense has been lost along the way. I myself was struggling to find out what it wanted to tell me as it actually seems to say that the monitor is not detectable. Actually everything from resolution to 3D speed was OK, just that the configuration dialog seemed not reachable.

My dad: Mail is broken. There are no messages any more.

What happened:


Lucid Lynx updates to Thunderbird 3. When this new version comes up the first time it shows some introductory page about the new things in thunderbird and asks to decide what mailboxes to sync for offline availability. You may already guess it: This page hides the normal mailbox view and my dad failed to see what was happening, which would just need him to see the tabs on the top. But as Thunderbird had no tabbed interface yet he just did not see it.

This maybe is the weakest point in the list where you might say "Oh come on...", but take into account the "trouble" that my dad already had seen until then and the confusion that it caused. Also take into account that Lucid failed to install the german language package for Thunderbird 3 which again left my dad struggling with an english page.

And my 2ct about this page: This offline sync ability may be a great functionality for power users but the casual user is completely overstrained with this "solution" until he himself gets the matching "problem". So I have my doubts if it is neccessary and healthy to present this customization page for each-and-every updating user. My guess would be that 90% just shook their head and clicked it away.

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Kommentare:

Dina Mittwoch 07. Juli 2010, 18:15

*benignantly smiling to myself* ....
Hope, your sympathy with us will last. I have SO MUCH experience with all my technical guys who blame ME for not making understandable what I want in my blogs, on my phone, on my computer.....And I call myself an experienced end-user with a geekish half knowledge regarding technical issues and a thorough understanding of end-user-staff ;-)
Yours sincerly
alpha-to-omega end-user blog-tester

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