Gentoo-Epiphany
From Grokdoc
Complete novice, never used a computer before
I set up Gentoo with the standard Gnome Desktop Environment for my mother, who until recently had not used computers. I did this because she expressed the wish to surf the web and use email.
After login I told her the browser was in the menu, she went through them and found epiphany without problems. I had google set up as her startpage and from there she instantly started surfing. The back button was a no brainer, but I have yet to see her type in a URL manually.
After a short while I got the question how she could remember where a certain page was. She had written it down on a piece of paper, but had not figured out she could type it in the adress bar. I actually typed it for her and I told her that there was a bookmark system. She took a look at it and clicked the bookmarks button. What a mistake this turned out to be, more on this later. After she did not manage to file a bookmark in the window that poped up I told her to use the menu. She of course found ´add bookmark´ and added the current page without a problem.
Later on she figured the button was for accessing your bookmarks (it´s not really, it's more for managing and organizing them if you failed to do that when you added them.) This time after the frustration she figured the menu had to be the solution again.
Conclusion
My conclusions from this are:
That the bookmarks button is useless. The expected functionality is not found there. Opening bookmarks from another window is annoying to the user. Make that button do what is expected, drop down a list of bookmarks or open a sidebar with bookmarks, anything but the current functionality. Toolbar buttons are used to provide a quicker way to access menu functions, but this one offers access to the wrong function.
Apart from this epiphany (web browser) is easy to find for a novice user and (mostly) has a clear and easy to understand interface. The lack of confusing options makes it almost the perfect browser for a beginner.
-- Omega_Supreme_NL
