Re: GNOME 2.23 Schedule

["Felipe Contreras" <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 12:07 AM, Peteris Krisjanis <pecisk gmail com> wrote:
> 2008/3/17, Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>:
>
>
> > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 11:25 PM, Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net> wrote:
>  >  >
>  >  >
>  >  >  On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 23:22 +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>  >  >  > On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 9:36 PM, Ross Burton <ross burtonini com> wrote:
>  >  >  > > On Mon, 2008-03-17 at 20:50 +0200, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>  >  >  > >  > Still the input from the user-base is not considered?
>  >  >  > >  >
>  >  >  > >  > How much a simple most-wanted-feature poll could hurt?
>  >  >  > >
>  >  >  > >  Do the poll entries come with patches attached?  If there is a feature
>  >  >  > >  missing then file a bug and either wait for someone else to code it, pay
>  >  >  > >  someone to code it, or code it yourself.
>  >  >  >
>  >  >  > I find it difficult to achieve the 10x10 goal without knowing what the
>  >  >  > users really want.
>  >  >
>  >  >  Actually, we already know what users want. We're missing people
>  >  >  implementing it though...
>  >
>  >
>  > Good, is there a list of those features?
>  >
>
>  I am getting tired from this myth. Duh. As usual, "what users want" is
>  simple slogan, but in real life, everything is much more difficult.
>
>  What actually users want? What are these users? Current KDE/Windows/OS
>  X users? Which feature is best for them? Or we are talking about happy
>  GNOME users here who probably would like us to continue incremental
>  updates, just with bigger workforce?
>
>  As user support guy for 10 years, I would say - that is nonsense.
>  There are two groups of users - first one is users who don't care
>  about features, they want to have them there, right in their desktop.
>  You offer them feature set, they use it. But if you will ask them what
>  they lack in their desktop, you won't get clear answer. That is why we
>  have professional GUI and desktop user studies for, because they
>  analyze user behavior and understand what they expect, _without_
>  asking directly to user.
>
>  And yes, you will never poll this group rightly unless you have some
>  miracle screen which shows each such GNOME user. They are many, but
>  they are very, very random.
>
>  And another group is superusers, who want everything and nothing -
>  they requirements are very specific and usually they take their part
>  in bug reporting and even providing patches (when they want to fix app
>  they love/use much). They can be polled though on many arch. aspects,
>  including such changes as gvfs, pulseaudio, integration stuff. But
>  that will be very specific.

I would say those are supergroups, but there are many other kinds of
users. There's for example the desktop ricers which might be advanced
users but not know a thing of programming.

>  To summarize this, GNOME ain't Windows and we ain't Microsoft. We
>  don't and probably will never have budget to have huge marketing
>  studies about what users want. Microsoft thosed tons of money to
>  investigate new interface for Office - and it still have made lot of
>  users mad. So I suggest not to try to waste our time to this.

There are many ways to improve usability[1], not all of them are expensive:

Focus Group:
A monthly online focus groups doesn't cost a thing. Some mortal "user"
can be in charge of gathering conclusions so no developer is
disturbed.

Usability Testing:
Put your GNOME desktop in front on some user, watch him and write down
his problems. Again, no developer needs to do that.

Surveys:
Just ask your users. Some web developer(s) would need to work on this.

</snip>


The problem is that developers don't like users; who would scratch
somebody else's itch? That's not a big deal in a lot of open source
projects, because developer equals to user, but in a Desktop
Environment the diversity of users is overwhelming.

So not all the issues get visibility, only the ones of patient users,
at least enough to find out the proper ways to report them. There's a
lot of users without that amount of patience.

What I'm talking about here is the Product P in marketing; if you want
your product to sell, you need to make it appealing to your market.

If the target market is devoted users who would fill bug reports and
possibly attach patches, then GNOME is on the right track. If the
target market is 10% of the global desktop market then you need luck
to achieve that goal without analyzing your true target market.

[1] http://www.usability.gov/methods/

-- 
Felipe Contreras