Control Center

Desktop Control Center
Role: Chief Researcher, User Experience Architect
The Control Center which was shipped with the Novell Linux Desktop (and was consequently widely adopted by companies like Ubuntu and Red Hat with their Linux Desktop distributions) was designed by my team and extensively researched and tested in the mobile usability lab which I designed and built. Every aspect of the Control Center (from its look and feel, its language, its organization, its window behaviors, how settings are applied, its mechanisms for providing feedback, etc) was developed under my supervision. I also conducted the heuristic analyses, wrote all the tasks, recruited the subjects, wrote the Control Center’s functional specification, interpreted test results, ensured Section 508 compliance, and liaised with our development, QA and marketing teams as the final version of the Control Center was built, tested, shipped and publicized.
There is always tension within the Linux Desktop world regarding whether or not to emulate the designs used in Mac OS and Windows. As we tested different iterations of the Control Center’s design, we discovered which aspects of these mainstream designs worked well for our users (Mac OS did a reasonable job of grouping settings in a logical way but failed to provide adequate labels to organize groups of settings, while the sheer number of Windows settings confused all but the most confident users), and which did not. By carefully choosing test subjects and writing tasks for them which allowed them to search, discover, browse, experiment, make mistakes and recover, we were able to arrive at design which was accessible, easy to learn, simple to remember and forgiving.