User:Fnmueller

From openSUSE

Hi, my name is Felix-Nicolai Müller. As of 2008 I am 23 years old and live in Germany, where I also go to university, studying psychology.

I'm using Linux since about 10 years. My first contact to Linux was SuSE 6.0 in 1998. In my beginners phase I played with lots of Distros, some of which ceased to exist, but I always returned to openSUSE for it does what I want it to do.
I regard myself as a regular users - who just wants his system to work for him – with a little extra knowledge.

My main contribution to the openSUSE project is connected to my interest in psychology. I do a lot of user support on Freenode in #opensuse-de to see what the actual user problems are and to understand how a user thinks. This has the nice side effect that I can help many users. I also serve as an Operator in #opensuse-de and are actively involved in contributing my opinions about how to change and form the openSUSE distribution in the future (usability wise).
I have been on Freenode helping users for more than two years (as of 2008) and decided to maintain the German factoids. I also try to help users getting accustomed to the rules of IRC so they can find efficient help quickly.

My opinion about usability:
In my opinion usability consists of two important factors.
1. Desktop Environments need to be intuitive.
This does certainly not mean, that they have to copy Windows, nor does it mean, that there need to be many clicks done to achieve the goal. This is what most research is done on.
2. Desktop Environments need to teach the user proactively and subliminally on how to work with them.
This aspect has been and is still not being regarded as being that important. Think about how Windows users tackle a problem. Compare that to users who have never used a computer before. Windows users have learned a certain way of doing things, often contradicting the obvious way.
There will not be a software product / DE that fits both user types perfectly. Either only one usertype is perfectly satisfied (in a perfect product), or both usertypes will not get what they really want and be unhappy or at least not satisfied with the product. This means, the only way to satisfy everyone is to make an intuitive DE which will than teach you (without much user interaction) how to use it in the process. Microsoft did not do a bad job on the teaching part – even though it reminds one more of conditioning. Future Desktop Environments need to take it a step further. And a lot more research has to be done in this area in the future.

Another thing I am interested in is user attitude adjustment. Specifically on IRC the steps we have taken so far (better OP-System with clear rules, short introductory rules, etc) seem to be working out. However, this is just a preliminary, heuristic observation.

Minor contributions I do are in the area of bug reporting and fixing.

My nick on IRC:
fnmueller

Links:
My homepage
My blog
German factoids
The 10 golden Rules of IRCing

--Fnmueller 12:50, 19 February 2008 (UTC)