Re: GNOME user survey 2011

[Christophe Fergeau <teuf gnome org>]

Hi,

2011/8/1 Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>:
> I other words, you are saying that it doesn't matter if 100% of the
> responders of this survey say GNOME has too few options, nothing would
> be done? Is there *any* kind of evidence that would convince GNOME ppl
> that users want more options? Or is it what the wishes of users are
> completely irrelevant?

It seems you are starting under the assumption that the results of the
survey will be representative of G3 users as a whole. What are your
plans to make sure people unhappy with GNOME are not over represented
in the poll results? Given the kind of questions, it's bound to
attract answers from people who want more options, and I don't think
how we can go from "N% of the people who took the survey said they
wanted more options" to "M% of *all* G3 users want more options". To
me, these figures will be totally unrelated, unless I missed something
in the way you want to run the poll.

Since your actual goal seems to use this survey results to pressure
people into adding more options to GNOME (where "more options"
probably really means "the options you want to have"), I'm afraid this
poll will turn into "I want to prove X, let's design a survey whose
result will be X". I even suspect that you'd get different results by
adding something like "Do you get confused by software with too many
configuration options ? Yes/No" " before asking the question about the
amount of configuration options ;)

In short, I think making a good poll is really hard, especially if you
want to use this poll to prove that some specific point is true or
not. Imo, the best we can get from a poll is "ok, some people think X,
unfortunately we have no idea about what the people who did not answer
the poll think"

Christophe