Re: My usability experience - Asa Dotzler should be fired

On 2011-08-18 08:04, Asa Dotzler wrote: > Chris Eaton wrote:
>> But how does this help my parents, or grandma, or anybody else like
>> them? Those people don't go to Help> About. To test this out I
>> actually called my parents and asked them what version of FF they use.
>
> Well, I actually dealt with half a dozen people last month who read
> about the new 5.0.1 release and were upset that they were't getting it.
> They were confused and became distrustfull of Firefox because the about
> dialog told them they were up to date with Firefox 5 but the thing they
> read on the Web told them that 5.0.1 was the latest.
>
> I had another interesting encounter with an irate Linux user who was
> ticked off because he heard that Firefox 7 had some huge memory
> improvements but he'd checked his about window and it said he was on the
> up to date version called 5.0. He thought we were ignoring Linux and
> leaving it behind on an older version.

Interesting scenario but I think you're looking at it the wrong way. 
This is actually a good example of how people sometimes need to find out 
what version they have, even under the new release paradigm.

The situation is this: the user has heard about improvements in Firefox 
7 and wants to know if the version they are running includes them. In 
the proposed design they would see a statement saying they are running 
the latest version and it would do nothing whatsoever to help them. If 
it were me I imagine I would become frustrated that I can't find the 
version information where I expect it to be. Or perhaps I would be 
misled into thinking that since it's the latest version, it must be it. 
And if it was a user-facing feature that I was looking to use, I would 
be very frustrated for not being able to find it.

You are probably going to say that it's the question of communication 
and that Mozilla is going to stop talking about releases in terms of 
version numbers. However, this still doesn't help our user. OK, so the 
user would have heard about the memory improvements without any version 
number mentioned, just that it "landed on Aurora channel" at some point. 
How are they supposed to find out if they've already got them?

Anyway, our user probably didn't hear about the improvements directly 
from Mozilla but read about it at some forum, blog, or wherever. I 
assert that many people, including plenty of journalists, will keep 
talking in terms of version numbers. It has become instinctive to think 
in terms of version numbers and it is unrealistic to expect everybody to 
switch - even worse, keep switching back and forth - between completely 
different frames of thinking in regard to Firefox than in case of every 
other application. As long as a significant portion of the public thinks 
and talks in terms of versions numbers, we can't pretend they are obsolete.

- Adam