Re: Empathy survey results

[Milo Casagrande <milo casagrande name>]

2009/8/1 Shaun McCance <shaunm gnome org>:
>
> 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.

I'll move the Empathy one there.

I was thinking about doing one for Brasero, that's one application I
would like it to have Mallard docs for 3.0. Aftert WOSCON, me and Phil
brainstormed a little bit about some Brasero topics while at the
airport. I have a note with all that ideas.

Maybe having a couple of people working on it wouldn't be bad.

> 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?

Yes, that's true. Q4 is 100% on the "Yes".

> 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.

Probably it's because we didn't ask *how* difficult it was to launch,
but only if it was *somewhat* difficult. Probably with Q6 and Q7 it
could have been a good idea to have a second pop-up question in case
people answered "No", asking them why it was not easy.

Unfortunately Google Forms doesn't permit that (or I don't know how to
do it with). If we want to do other survey (and we should do), maybe
we better use something different that can permit us more choices and
a little bit more flexibility. I've seen people using SurveyMonkey,
maybe we can try that one too.

> 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?

It's kind of difficult to write an upstream doc that will deal with
downstreams problems. I could write how to deal with Ubuntu problems
maybe (sometimes it depends also on me having those problems or
knowing about those problems), but that might not be true for Fedora:
different packages name, different directories structure, different
kernels (I have no idea how different they are, just guessing).

In this situation, I would really like to see downstream integrating
what their users want: inserting topics that users ask on their
forums, IRC channels, mailing list, wherever. Maybe they can do that
even without working on Empathy docs: creating their own package that
the community will deal with.

> 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.)

A small listiquette would be a good topic to write anyway, even if
it's not really easy to use the Empahty IRC feature.

It's not on my action list, but if somebody would like to write that
topic, even in a pure text file, that would be really great: we can
take care of integrating it.

> 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.

Yes, we have interesting data to work on.

Thank you.

-- 
Milo Casagrande <milo casagrande name>