The Hard Six

A friend of mine recently asked me if I thought Ubuntu was suitable for his mother-in-law. In a nutshell, he didn’t want to spend the money for a MacBook given that she is a very basic user. So he bought a Dell laptop with Vista Home Premium and both him and his mother-in-law couldn’t stand it.

The basic user problem is an interesting conundrum. It’s hard to justify purchasing a $999 MacBook (and Office, and AppleCare, etc…) for a user who checks their email, surfs the web, and maybe whips up an occasional spreadsheet. But most casual users I know can’t stand Vista. The consensus seems to be “everything is different, but I don’t see any tangible improvements.” XP is often a viable option, but it’s becoming harder and harder to buy a laptop with XP on it, and lets be honest: XP is old and lacks a lot of functionality that is par for the course in a modern operating system. Apple experienced a similar stall in the 90s with System 7, but System 8 was hailed as a vast improvement and most users migrated quickly. On the other hand, Windows XP is still the dominant version of Windows nearly eight years after it’s release.

So, what about Linux? Ubuntu is “Linux for Human Beings,” right?

My ex-girlfriend, who was getting increasingly frustrated with XP, volunteered for a Linux experiment back in mid-2006. The current version of Ubuntu at the time was 6.06 Dapper Drake. It worked for a little while…

But in the end, she went back to Windows because she was a heavy Photoshop user, and Gimp’s UI didn’t cut it. She also had music purchased off the iTS, although I suppose that’s not a problem these days.

Now, if she didn’t need Photoshop, she may have very well stuck with Ubuntu. She is pretty computer savvy (of course she is, she dated me) so the experiment with my ex isn’t a perfect example of the basic user problem. But, the ultimate conclusion I arrived at on Linux for “normal people” is that it’s suitable for super basic users, advanced users, but pretty much useless for those in between.

Unfortunately for Linux, this is where the majority of computer users lie.

Linux’s coverage of the extreme ends of the user spectrum is a direct consequence of the Linux UI design philosophy, which is “design for the dumb user.” This, of course, is a terrible way to go about designing a UI, but that’s beyond the scope of this discussion. The point is, if a user fits into the super basic user category, then Ubuntu may well be suitable because it covers the “the basics” well enough.

In 2009, the “basic functionality list” is commonly cited as:

• Web
• Email
• Word Processing & Spreadsheets
• Music management
• Photo management

For these five tasks, Ibex includes Firefox, Evolution, OpenOffice, Rhythmbox, and F-Spot. The Ubuntu users I know replace Evolution with Thunderbird, Rhythmbox with Songbird, and F-Spot with Picasa, and I tend to agree with them, although I am by no means a heavy Ubuntu user.

So, if you’re just trying to provide “basic functionality,” Ubuntu with these three additional apps should suffice.

The problem with the “basic functionality” approach is that it’s difficult to predict when a user might need to move beyond the list. Basic functionality is all well and good, but “basic” users foray into more advanced functionality more often than a lot of nerds expect. Photo editing is often one of the first tasks that a “basic user” will become interested in, and Gimp’s UI is atrocious. This, among other reasons, is why the “dumb user” school of UI design invariably fails for the general populace - it doesn’t make it easy for users to explore other aspects of their computer. If you browse the Ubuntu forums, you’ll see that many of the solutions presented by the power users involve the command line.

As a UI designer, if your solution to a user’s problem involves the command line, you have failed your task as UI designer. Browse Apple’s knowledge base. Solutions involving the terminal are few and far between. Even on the user populated discussion forums, the terminal is rarely presented as a solution.

The good news is, some users will in fact never (or very infrequently) move beyond those five tasks. I told my friend that if he believes his mother-in-law is in this boat, Ubuntu may be a viable option.

Even if Linux never fully shapes up, its saving grace will be the internet. As more and more computer functionality moves online, more and more users will be content with replacing desktop apps with web apps. At that point, the OS is merely an environment for a web browser to run on, and the usability of the OS itself becomes much less relevant.

As for my ex, she eventually bought a white MacBook. She loves it to pieces.