The release of Ubuntu 11.04 is imminent, and with it will come a radically new type of desktop interface in the form of Unity. Will users love it or hate? A recent report from Canonical’s design team provides some telling insights. Here are the highlights.
The report, by Charline Poirier of Canonical’s design team, discusses both a number of major improvements that have been implemented in Unity since it debuted last year, as well as several problems which user testing reveals to be persistent on the eve of the Ubuntu 11.04 release.
What’s Fixed
First, the positive: Since last October, when Mark Shuttleworth announced that Unity would become the default interface for all desktop versions of Ubuntu, expanding on its original role in the netbook-specific build, a number of major problems with Unity appear to have been effectively addressed by developers. Poirier’s report mentions a number of improvements, the most remarkable of which include:
- Performance: Users report a much smoother and responsive experience.
- Multitasking: Confusion over how to switch between windows appears resolved.
- Deleting files: In October, users reported difficulty understanding how to delete files — a pretty major problem. In April testing, this ceased to be an issue.
- Copy and paste: Another centrally damning problem, the inability to copy and paste between windows, has also been resolved since October.
What’s Not
While Unity has come a long way since last October, it is not yet perfect. The report also pointed to several problems of significant import which may not bode well for users:
- Users exhibit difficulty locating the “Rubbish Bin” and certain other icons.
- Some actions lack sufficient feedback, which can contribute to perceptions of sluggishness.
- The Ubuntu Software Center is not readily identifiable by many users, who mistake it for a system-control application.
- The Dash, a major component of Unity’s interface, does not appear easily recognizable, which could pose major usability problems, since the Dash is central to Unity’s interfacing with the user.
Poirier also cited several less-pressing issues which, though perhaps not as serious as those listed above, remain to be fixed in Unity.
Fortunately for Canonical, the lingering usability issues listed above boil down essentially to problems related to intuitiveness and user expectation, rather than fundamental design flaws. Difficulty finding the Rubbish Bin, for example, could reflect users’ prior experiences with other desktop interfaces as much as a deficiency in Unity itself — and indeed, Poiriers discussed in her report notable differences between the way Mac and Windows users approached Unity.
Unlike fundamental flaws such as poor performance, problems stemming from lack of intuitiveness can be overcome with time, as users learn to become familiar with a strange interface. That solution is not as ideal as presenting a desktop that feels completely natural at first glance, but it at least means that most users should be able to learn to like Unity once they get used to it.
Moreover, although Unity is the central new feature of the upcoming release of Ubuntu, it won’t be until the next long-term support (LTS) version of Ubuntu in April 2012 that Unity is likely to reach the desktops of a majority of non-geeky Ubuntu users, where usability issues can do the most damage. The 11.04 release will provide an opportunity to test Unity for users wishing to do so, but we can expect traditional GNOME 2.x to remain a major part of the Ubuntu experience for a while to come.
And Canonical developers therefore have some breathing room to enjoy as they prepare Unity to take on a truly influential role on open source desktops around the world. Stay tuned over the next year to see how the interface evolves as it approaches its major test, Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.
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“Fortunately for Canonical, the lingering usability issues listed above boil down essentially to problems related to intuitiveness and user expectation, rather than fundamental design flaws.”
Isn’t this a bit disingenuous since we are talking about UI design? Essentially, the claim is, ‘hey it works fine, people just can’t use it’. A successful UI change would have lingering performance issues with no intuitiveness problems. Usability is the design paradigm, so any issues there are necessarily design flaws.
And if you think that user expectation is not something that can be addressed, there are a raft of studies about Apple’s UI paradigms overcoming unfamiliarity with intuitiveness.
Marco: you make a good point, but what I was trying to get at is that these days, when almost everyone has experience using computers and virtually no one is a blank slate when she first sits down in front of Ubuntu, a great deal of what constitutes “good” usability is constructed rather than natural. It’s based on what’s familiar from previous experiences, rather than what’s objectively better. The fact that Canonical designers noted differences between former Windows and OS X users with respect to their approaches to Unity reflects this point.
This isn’t to say that one design can’t be objectively superior to another, or to deny that Unity has deep flaws (it does, just like everything else). But it does mean that many perceived usability deficiencies are likely to disappear once users get used to them, precisely because usability is linked to users’ experience as much as it is to objective intuition.
That said, Unity clearly has room to improve, and I look forward to seeing how it evolves over the upcoming two release cycles, in anticipation of the next LTS release in April 2012.
The challenge wrt Unity and Gnome 3 isn’t really the desktop UI’s as they in the coming years will be able to adjust and improve this radically.
The problem resides with the applications. Applications are “Gnome orientated”. They are developed individually and each application is designed to “do one thing and do it well”.
That will make applications a showstopper for a number of reasons:
- The workflows between “Gnome oriented” applications are virtually non existent.
- Each application needs to be individually upgraded to match the new paradigm thus they will struggle with taking advantage of work in other applications going throug the same process.
- Therefore it will take a long long time before existing applications are able to benefit from the new UI/DE concepts.
- The progress will vary amongst applications pending upon resources available and desire/willingness to modernize.
This becomes a quite significant problem when a rapid change in concept takes place. The applications are not able to benefit. Therefore, the users will not be able to take advantage of the modernisation of the desktop environment (DE).
The easy solution is to increase the use of cloudbased apps/services, but Canonical/Ubuntu’s choice is somewhat different. They have picked up Qt and therefore will see benefits from some KDE and MeeGO technology in the DE and applications and applets.
It’s the inclusion of Qt that will make Unity make sense. In a year or two. Or three….
Unity is beautiful, but it’s hard to be productive with it. And to me design is all about usefulness.
“Users exhibit difficulty locating the “Rubbish Bin” and certain other icons.”
The Rubbish bin essentially moved from the bottom right side to the bottom left side. I don’t think this is a design flaw. If you fill up the side panel, then the rubbish bin may disappear, just like any application. But you can pull the apps easily up and down to make it reappear, hmmm. This is astonishing.
“Some actions lack sufficient feedback, which can contribute to perceptions of sluggishness.”
This is fairly abstract and I don’t really know what it means.
“The Ubuntu Software Center is not readily identifiable by many users, who mistake it for a system-control application.”
That’s interesting. They will have to change the icon of the software centre. At the moment it looks like a basket containing different tools. Maybe the icon should look like the entrance of a store/supermarket.
“The Dash, a major component of Unity’s interface, does not appear easily recognizable, which could pose major usability problems, since the Dash is central to Unity’s interfacing with the user.”
I think this is in fact a real problem. I really needed some time to get used to the dash. I’ve kind of gotten used to it. It is pretty for sure. The search is not as smart as gnome do. Browsing for apps by categories is clumsy compared to gnome 2.xx