Re: This list, suggestions, frustration

[Calum Benson <calum benson oracle com>]

On 5 Jul 2010, at 21:43, Owen Taylor wrote:

> * You aren't a representative user. (How do I know
>   this?  Because you are reading a mailing list on gnome.org; which
>   puts your interest in technology and motivation well beyond most
>   users.) Our goal is that GNOME 3.0 is better than GNOME 2.0 
>   for *all* users, including you, but you need to be aware that
>   changes have to take into account that larger set of users.

This is very true... and I suspect a related cause of this particular frustration is probably that those target users don't seem to be clearly defined anywhere. Neither do any task analyses or usability studies or other feedback from some of those representative users, which the design team has hopefully been gathering to define or validate prototypes as they're going along, seem to be readily available to peruse.

Lack of that sort of information often leads people to assume (however incorrectly) that designers are just making "best guesses", rather than informed decisions. Which in turn leads the onlookers at large to believe that their opinions have just as much chance of influencing the ongoing design as anybody else's, resulting in everyone just diving in saying how *they'd* like it to work :)  And the inevitable lack of detailed responses from busy developers does indeed result in some of that "pent-up frustration" that Owen refers to.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Oracle Corporation Ireland Ltd.
mailto:calum benson oracle com         Solaris Desktop Team
http://blogs.sun.com/calum             +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Oracle Corp.