Just a quick post about how important iconography and using recognisable icons can actually be! Watch the video below from the YouTube channel ‘OSFirstTimer’ in which an Australian woman uses ‘Red Star OS 3.0’ – a North Korean operating system. The catch: the operating system is only available in the Korean language. Interestingly though, through the use of fairly logical iconography and button placement she was able to distinguish what the various buttons did and the kinds of programs they’d open. I do wonder if the GUI that resembles Mac OS X also had anything to do with it though.
North Korea’s regime means that internet access is highly regulated by the state so common operating systems and browsers are not used, instead this Linux-based operating system called Red Star OS is very popular and a version of Firefox called ‘Naenara’ (which translates roughly as ‘My country’) is used instead and all communications to and from the internet on these platforms are monitored by the government. More about this is explained in the video and can be read in the Wikipedia articles for Red Star OS and Naenara.
Take a look at the screenshot of Red Star OS below. Without being able to read Korean and without having any prior knowledge of how Mac OS X (which Red Star looks like, but is NOT based upon!) works, you can probably see that thanks to iconography it’s easy enough to see that the icons in the dock are as follows (L-R): a file explorer, a web browser, a video/media player, a calendar, an address book/contacts, a search facility, a calculator, system settings, system information, an open program(?) and a trash can/recycle bin.
OSFirstTimer’s videos generally follow the format of a tech-savvy teenager called Phillip getting his mum, Dianna (who is assumed to be non-tech savvy), to complete a variety of tasks in a variety of operating systems – everything ranging from old stuff like MS DOS and Windows 3.1 to modern stuff like Windows 10 and macOS High Sierra to the more unique and bizarre stuff like this Red Star OS and Tails (a Debian-based OS aimed at anonymous computing). Putting the comedy aspect of the channel aside, it is basic usability testing in action! A series of tasks have to be completed and a typical end-user has to complete the tasks, rather like the user testing that I carried out during my Stellardrive and Nellie’s Nursery (February and March 2018) projects. Though interestingly, neither Phillip or Dianna seem to realise that they are doing usability testing which is a key part of the UX journey – the channel is clearly made for entertainment purposes.
So, if you want my recommendation for a light-hearted approach to usability testing, watch some of OSFirstTimer’s videos on YouTube!
Image credit
Red Star OS 3.0 screenshot: By KCC – KCC reseller, GPL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=30685795