Shades of the famous Star Trek IV movie moment when Scotty tried to talk to his mouse, here is a sobering anecdote about how one woman went badly (but understandably) awry in usability testing:
Over the last several months we at Novell have sent a team of people around the world with a portable usability testing lab: two video cameras — one on the face, one on the hands — and a frame grabber, recording everything the user does. We ask our subjects to perform five or six simple tasks with GNOME and burn the result to a DVD.
…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.
Related posts:
An alternative re-telling of this story might involve marketing telling engineering that the menu entry had to be ‘(company name) (brand name)’ instead of ‘Email’, even though engineering repeatedly protested that it would be impossible to find. Ahem.
There are no user failures. There are only product design failures. From the snippet provided, it is easy to see the defects in Novell’s interface. Having made an error (pressing SEND), she got no feedback to help her achieve what she wanted to achieve.
There are lots of stories out there about “dumb” users, but the reality is that there are only dumb designs and broken prduct development efforts.
The stupidity of calling a mail application “Evolution” is another notable point in this example. Apple has it exactly right: its mail application is called “Mail”.