Re: Call for constructive user criticism.

[Erik Walthinsen <omega cse ogi edu>]

On Sun, 1 Aug 1999, Havoc Pennington wrote:

> The challenge of this initiative is to get concrete, specific suggestions
> for enhancing apps. If it loses that focus, it's worthless.

I was thinking about this quite a bit a while ago, after reading through
most of the Interface Hall of [Sh,F]ame.  Very useful site because of its
format (though it's Windoze-centric), and here's what I was thinking of
creating at the time:

A site that would collect reviews of various versions of packages, with
numerous screenshots, and one or two people per package who take all the
review data and put it together into a useful form, listing things that
are right and wrong about the interface, suggestions for fixing problems,
potential enhancements, and things that are so good they should be global.

Each interface aspect that deviates from the 'norm' (either good or bad) 
would be given a thread, with the 'official' collected review at the top,
revisioning of that, and annotations/comments from anyone attached to
revisions as appropriate.  The package as a whole would have a thread with
a TOC-style collected review with links to the relevant threads. 

This puts a fair burden on the person or people coordinating the collected
review, and such people would have to be chosen rather carefully.  Someone
very responsible would have to keep up with all the moderators to make
sure they don't do something stupid.

So this isn't a lightweight setup, but I think it's the best way to take
advantage of all the people out there who have some comment about a
package but don't want to spend too much time mentioning it.  Just go to
the site, write a couple sentences, and someone a little more versed in
HCI would look at it and deal with it appropriately. 

The main thing is that the authors of each package need to be very
involved in this.  Possibly each revision of the collected review would be
mailed to the `cat AUTHORS` of the package at a minimum.  As changes are
made, the authors need to keep everyone else up to date so their changes
can be quickly commented on, and the collected review can be rev'd to
match.

Does this sound like a sane architecture for organizing, and threading the
comments/reviews, and applying feedback principles?  Sound like it would
be worth implementing in some form?

TTYL,
    Omega

         Erik Walthinsen <omega@cse.ogi.edu> - Staff Programmer @ OGI
        Quasar project - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/DISC/projects/quasar/
   Video4Linux Two drivers and stuff - http://www.cse.ogi.edu/~omega/v4l2/
        __
       /  \             SEUL: Simple End-User Linux - http://www.seul.org/
      |    | M E G A           Helping Linux become THE choice
      _\  /_                          for the home or office user