Re: roadmap status update/update request

[Alan Cox <alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>]

On Maw, 2005-03-08 at 18:21, William Jon McCann wrote:
> How do we define effectiveness?  Is the primary goal to empower the user 
> or help improve the system?  And perhaps one of the biggest problems, 
> how can you ever get positive feedback so that the sample pool is not 
> distorted?

Well the CIO might tell you it is efficiency, the user will perhaps tell
you its ease of use for their task (or anonymously the card games), the
administrator will tell you its managability or maybe security, the
consultant will tell you its configurability and migration tools 8)

Sales has a lot of ideas around decision makers - who makes the
decision, who influences it, who can veto it, who defines the needs etc.
Very rarely are they all the same person. Nor IMHO can you say "only the
user really matters", because the sysadmin has a job to do, the CIO has
a company to run, and the consultant has solutions to provide.

> Actual humans become frustrated when they feel voiceless/powerless.  How 
> can we open channels?  Create a Whack-A-Gnome/Kiss-A-Gnome game and try 
> to correlate the ratio of smacks/smooches to user discontentment?  Ok, 
> I'm joking.

On the serious side people let off steam by screaming, yelling, moaning,
blaming the sysadmins (but never "the computer has been running stably
all week can I buy you a beer"). So talk to sysadmins running the
desktop, ask them about experiences and comments (good and bad) from
their userbase. 

Ask them about things they changed and why. Ask them what they observed
about their userbase. Every day they get the "why can't I print", "I
need to use A3 paper", "where has my icon gone", "my panel has moved"
type questions. I suspect everyone here who runs Gnome or KDE desktops
for other people may have some of that information. Tiny bits perhaps
but together they make up the picture.

Sysadmins will tell you things like "we had a menu panel along the top
but no bottom panel. We had to add a menu button on a bottom panel
because otherwise many users couldn't figure out how to log out"

Alan