A colleague sent me this link to an article on Slashdot today:
Conducting a Unix Desktop Usability Study?
In short, someone is going to do a usability study comparing initial experiences of KDE and GNOME.
A few of the comments by the community were things like this:
Who cares if the first time someone uses the environment that it takes a little orientation to get used to? In the real world, if a couple of weeks of pain makes you much more productive after that, it's a net benefit imho - the remainder of your time using the environment outweighs the significance of the learning time.
A few years ago, my manager here started making a big push on evaluating "out of the box experience" issues. That is, first time use of a product. At the time, I thought this was a little misguided to put so much emphasis into this small sliver of the user experience.
Yet, over time, I've come to see that if you get this portion of the user experience wrong, nothing else matters.
Twenty years ago, all software was relatively hard to use, and so everyone expected to have to put in some "pain" to get going.
But, technology has become omnipresent, and step by step folks have made getting started easier (not just easier, but increasingly "delightful"), more folks (without time and interest to tinker) have become tech users, and even tech experts have substantially more tech stuff to learn and use than they used to. (in 1984, the whole MacOS, plus bundled apps fit on one 400K floppy). If your stuff isn't easy to be productive with instantaneously and it isn't absolutely critical to someone's life, that person will abandon it quickly.
It is true that for a heavily used system, over time you do become more productive as you learn your way around the system, and those aspects should be worked on too. First time use is absolutely not the same as experienced use. Yet, the only way to become experienced is to use it for a while, and the only way there is to get the initial experience right.