Re: [HIG] Getting recommendations back to developers

[Calum Benson <calum benson Sun COM>]

Adam Elman wrote:

> Yeah.  Of course, this (and Maciej's suggestions for usability bug
> reports) really apply to _any_ bug report for a free software
> application, not just "usability" bugs.  There really is no
> fundamental difference between a usability bug and a "traditional"
> bug except that the latter generally has more obviously-bad effects.

Actually, there's a feature article in last month's "Interactions"
magazine (the ACM's HCI periodical) about the pros and cons of reporting
usability bugs in the same database as functionality bugs, but sadly I
don't have the means to reproduce it here right now...

I guess one difference is that fixing a usability bug almost always
affects the documentation, which is something that's worrying the docs
team as they're pushing for an early GUI freeze to allow the docs to be
frozen (and, in Sun's case, translated into the 10 different languages
we require).  

As you say, though, developers are more likely to fix functionality bugs
first and leave the usability bugs until last, so there's a bit of a
conflict of interest there.  Even with the best education process in the
world it's hard to imagine we'll ever be able to change that around very
much, at least on those projects where there are only a couple of people
working on it at any one time.  Ho-hum...

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson ireland sun com    Desktop Engineering Group
http://www.sun.ie                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems