Re: Empathy survey results

[Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>]

On Mon, 2009-07-27 at 10:11 +0200, Milo Casagrande wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> always following yesterday docs meeting, we didn't discuss about the
> Empathy "survey" results.
> 
> I made a small document (odt and pdf, didn't have enough time to write
> a Mallard one) with all the graphics from the survey that you can find
> attached here (end of the page):
> 
> http://live.gnome.org/MiloCasagrande
> 
> (I would like to move those documents under the DocumentationProject,
> but don't know where to put them, ideas?)
> 
> Those documents are all but professional: if you find typos, errors,
> or would like to rewrite them in a more professional way or even in
> Mallard, feel free to do it.
> 
> Just to give an idea of what was the outcome: the IRC feature in
> Empathy is the most difficult to use. At the end of the document there
> are also some interesting topics that can be part of Empathy
> documentation and that need to be addressed in some way or another.
> 
> All in all I'm happy: we got some input form users, we now know what
> they will likely looking for in the documentation, and we have the
> confirmation that they use the Internet when looking for help! :)

Oh my gosh.  Why didn't I look at this earlier?  Why don't
we encourage ourselves to do more surveys in the future by
putting it under DocumentationProject/Surveys.  We can just
do a new section for each survey.

Some comments:

In Q4, it looks like 100% of the people found Empathy easy
to launch.  Is this true, or is it a result of the graph
not having enough visual precision?  I ask because in Q6,
a number of people didn't find it easy to find in the menu.
I'd love to have had comments from those people.

In Q8, I'm not at all surprised that searching the Internet
is the winner by a large margin.  I am somewhat surprised
that using the installed documentation (that's the sum of
three options there) is second by a good margin.  Although
the numbers are still low enough that this is unreliable.
Still, let's not forget that the documentation we write is
on the Internet as well, so we're helping people either way.

Q19 was a slap after so many questions being answered on
the easy side.  You mention that the difficulty could be
as a result of operating system issues, and I agree.  How
much can we anticipate those problems and give people an
idea of what they can do?

I love this piece from you: "how not to be a jerk when
asking question on the #telepathy channel".  I think it
would be great if documents each had a page telling you
where to go for more help (IRC, mailing lists).  And I
don't see any reason why we can't include some tips on
netiquette in those pages.  (Of course, in the case of
Empathy, directing people to IRC might be an ironic
insult, if what they're having problems with is IRC.)

Thanks a lot for this, Milo.  You have a lot of stuff
to chew on there at the end.  And even if this survey
was completely unscientific, I think we can get a lot
out of it.

--
Shaun