Hi, Last week I did usability tests of downloading, installing, and starting Tails with 5 people. I recruited them through friends of friends in activist circles. None of them had heard about Tails before.
I handed them a Tails leaflet (in Spanish) and asked them to go ahead and use it. They all installed and started on a MacBook Pro that I provided. Unfortunately, VLC didn't record any audio for some mysterious reason so I can't share any video clips with you. We hadn't tested this entire flow since 2015 and so many things happened since then. You can see the detailed findings and the 19 issues that I created from in this rainbow table: https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/ux/-/raw/master/first-time/rainbow_table.fods?inline=false Installation ============ - Download and install 3 of them had a pretty good installation experience of 10-20 minutes (download excluded). Tons of kudos to the USB images that made this process so much easier! 2 of them went a very bad route and took more than 1 hour to install despite me rescuing them. The good news is that I think we could help these people with only changes to the website. - Verifying Only 1 of them verified her download! She was the one who followed the instructions most diligently. All the other participants didn't verify for various reasons. Most surprisingly, some people didn't verify because they didn't understood that they had to select their download from the "Verify..." button in the download instructions. One of them even ended up in the design doc linked from the toggle section in search for verification instructions :) To solve this, I'll explain better the verification (#18776) and add it as a step in the overview (#18774). - Install The 2 people who took more than 1 hour to install were the kind of people who only follow instructions when in trouble -- and sometimes not even that :) For example: * They tried to open the USB image from the browser or macOS. I'll document this error message. (#18777) We could also distribute our images in ZIP files with help. (#18057) * They tried to copy the USB image on the USB stick because they didn't think that there were other installation steps. I'll clarify this in the steps in the overview. (#18774) Merging the overview, download, and steps will also help. (#16808) * Once they had the image on the USB stick, Etcher didn't let them install Tails on the same USB stick. Etcher should clarify their error message. (#18783) Persistent Storage ================== Then I asked them to download a picture from the Internet and save it to their Tails in a way that protects it if their USB stick is stolen. Only 3 participants had some time left. They all failed miserably. - The reference to the Persistent Storage on the leaflet didn't stick in their mind, and wasn't even clear when I told them that there was a clue in the leaflet. Until #15586, people won't find out about the Persistent Storage without external help. The Spanish translation said "volume", which didn't help. (#18767) - 2 of these 3 participants had a very hard time even download an image from the Tor Browser. They tried drag-and-drop, didn't find "Save Page As..." in the hamburger menu, didn't use the contextual menu (being on Mac probably didn't help), etc. - I'm not even mentioning the nightmare of saving to a folder permitted by Tor Browser. The low-hanging fruit for that is #15768, already in the shortlist of our UX debt. - Other than that, the new Persistent Storage interface worked fine! It was far from being stress-tested but I don't think it's worth it to test it more until we have more improvements of the blueprint implemented: https://gitlab.tails.boum.org/tails/blueprints/-/wikis/Persistent-Storage-redesign We only found a serious bug in the shortcut to the Persistent folder. -- sajolida Tails — https://tails.boum.org/ UX · Fundraising · Technical Writing
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