Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v4)

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com> wrote:

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 4:55 PM, Sam Thursfield <ssssam gmail com> wrote:
>
> Gathering feedback does not necessarily require an online user survey.

Indeed, do you have a better suggestion?

There are several other ways to get feedback.

For example, user testing. I'm sure all the major distributions have done some user testing. Most large companies have a whole user testing team/group.

I'm not a user testing expert but it involves giving people (both new and experienced) tasks to do, watching how they do it (without interfering) and then asking them about their experience.

I know people who have successfully used http://www.usertesting.com/ for web sites. I don't know if a similar, inexpensive option exists for desktop software or not. 

Stormy