Re: Prototyping the next generation panel?

["William Jon McCann" <william jon mccann gmail com>]

Hey Calum,

On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 11:23 AM, Calum Benson <Calum Benson sun com> wrote:
>
> On 28 Oct 2008, at 18:36, Karl Lattimer wrote:
>>
>> Gather up data from humble users, performing a specific set of tasks
>> which are challenging enough and enough like real life to build up
>> decent data sets so we can tell what's wrong with it before we write
>> _real_ code.
>
>
> On a related note, saw this article about Windows 7 today, which includes
> some info on their new taskbar:
> <http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081028-first-look-at-windows-7.html>
>
> "Through the Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP), an optional,
> off-by-default feature of many Microsoft programs, the company has learned a
> great deal about the things that users do. For example, from CEIP data
> Microsoft knows that 70% of users have between 5 and 15 windows open at any
> one time, and that most of the time they only actively use one or two of
> those windows."
>
> Although you certainly wouldn't use data like that as your only source of
> design input, it's the sort of concrete information about our users that we
> still seem to be rather lacking.

Very much agree with you.  However, one of the things that strongly
influenced the discussions at the GNOME UX Hackfest was the data
released on the Windows 7 Shell blog:
http://blogs.msdn.com/e7/archive/tags/Shell/default.aspx

While it certainly isn't a substitute for first hand data, I think it
is extremely interesting.  What do you make of it?

Jon