Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)

[Felipe Contreras <felipe contreras gmail com>]

On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
<federico ximian com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 18:35 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> What do you think?
>
> Keep in mind that Gnome 3 just hasn't been around for very long.  Right
> now Gnome 3 is most likely only being used by technical people, Linux
> enthusiasts, etc. - it has not trickled down to end users yet.  We may
> have found the top, obvious problems in Gnome 3, but not the long tail
> of bugs.

Which is why I suggested to wait until 3.2.

> I think the survey would be much more useful with free-form answers,
> instead of fixed options.  That way you may be able to eliminate one
> level of indirection ("oh, most people said 'somewhat', now let's make
> another survey to find out why").  While fixed options let you do
> amazing web hackery, free-form answers lead to more insightful results.

>From what I can see, you were dealing with a small numbers of
responders, so free-form is excellent, but when you are talking about
thousands of them, I don't think you can do very much.

It might be a good idea to add a bit more of them, but I think the
bulk should be fixed.

> * Being able to publish the raw results really helps; this way other
> people can help you extract statistics.  Do ask permission from the
> respondents to post their replies so that other people can study them.

I agree.

> * That survey probably gave too much importance to the system
> administrators themselves - not surprisingly, "better admin tools" was
> the most requested thing.  However, the survey *did* get us good insight
> into end-user's problems.

Makes sense.

> It may be very valuable to ask the heads of deployments what they think
> of Gnome 3 so far, even if they haven't evaluated it yet on their users
> - these people have a very good sense of what will work well for people
> in the "real world".
>
> By the way, the main page for the deployments is this (I don't know how
> up-to-date it is):
> https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/GnomeDeployments
>
> About two years after that survey got published, some people had the
> idea of making it periodic - unfortunately I lost track of them and of
> that effort.  You may want to look around for them; they'll have
> interesting thoughts, I'm sure.

While that might be interesting, I am more interested on getting as
many unfiltered results as possible.

-- 
Felipe Contreras