Summary of responses to round one questions about 3.0

["Jason D. Clinton" <me jasonclinton com>]

Below, I give a quick qualitative analysis of the responses in as objective as form as I can and the follow it up with some anecdotes and my opinions. Just stop reading after the data if you want to respond without having your opinion colored.

Summary:

Out of 9 attendees who blogged on the UX Hackfest and were emailed, 5 responded. The email sent was the following:

I am writing you this email on behalf of the GNOME Marketing Committee and because you were a UX Hackfest attendee.

The GNOME Marketing Committee is deeply concerned about the coherence of our message to the public about what the 3.0 release will be. Up until the UX Hackfest, that message was coherent: GNOME Shell with deep integration with presence management and time-based file management. Now, the Committee does not know what to tell the public. The Committee has empowered me to gather opinions about what attendees believe will be in 3.0.

Please answer the following four questions by one week from the time of this writing. Feel free to make your answer as short as you please: a one sentence answer is sufficient. Please know that I will make every attempt to keep your answer in confidence; however, I will provide a summary of the opinions of all attendees to the Committee.

In a follow-up round of emails, the Committee or its designee will include coders as well as the wider usability community in its inquiry. Those questions will be based on what we hear in this round of questions.

The questions for this first round:

• What new user-visible experiences will be in the GNOME 3.0 release?

• Who needs to work on it? Are there coders working on these features and do they agree with your time estimate?

• What is your long-term vision for the user experience beyond the 3.0 release?

• Please name individuals whom you believe should be included in the above-referenced second-round of emails.

Of those 5 who responded to question 1, "What new user-visible experiences will be in the Gnome 3.0 release?" 4/5 mentioned Shell as a positive change which would "certainly" or "would" be in the 3.0 release as "the" or "the biggest" major visible feature. 3/5 said that Gnome 3.0 would feature Gnome Activity Journal but used language like "uncertain" or "unclear" to describe the situation. 2/5 mentioned that a new Control Center was likely. 2/5 said that a new theme or icon theme set was likely to be in 3.0. 1/5 expressed a desire to see Nautilus changes but didn't know of anyone working on it.

Of those 2 who responded to questions 2, "Who needs to work on it? Are there coders working on these features and do they agree with your time estimate?" the first expressed concern about the Gnome Activity Journal and a11y reaching completion, the coverage of documentation at the 3.0 release due to the short freeze, the open status of dconf and its impact on the UI of all apps, and the constant shift in UI design of Shell git master. The other responded worried about not seeing "enough" repeatable usability evaluation of the new UI and that there generally not "enough" people working on Shell and Activity Journal.

Of those 5 who responded to question 3, "What is your long-term vision for the user experience beyond the 3.0 release?", 4/5 agreed that 3.0 was just the beginning of the realization of several long-term trends which would be fulfilled during the life of 3.x; the hold-out emphasized internal consistency in theming and color as developing over the life of 3.x. 2/5 saw 3.x as rounding out a "beta-ish" 3.0 release. 2/5 saw an change in fundamental file management methods over the life span. 2/5 saw an increase in the general portability of users and their data. 2/5 saw a general long-term approach to increase application usability and consistency. 1/5 saw more applications moving to Clutter. 1/5 saw People becoming "first-class objects".

Of the 2 who answer question 4, "Please name individuals whom you believe should be included in the above-referenced second-round of emails," the following names were offered: Owen Taylor, Colin Walters, Alex Larsson, Seif Lotfy, Thorsten Prante, Xavier Claessens, Guillaume Desmottes, Matthew Barnes, Chenthill Palanisamy, and Shaun McCance.

Caveats:

Seth, who we had discussed on our conference call in the context of the Pooper and the public image of Gnome 3.0, was one of the respondents. Other than confirming that he saw "Shell as 3.0" and not mentioning *any* of the ideas in his blog posts, his response was incomprehensible, post-modern evasion. I only bring this up because I think that it's safe to say at this point that none of Seth's ideas have any other champions.

No one from Shell replied. I begged them to in the middle of the week but it hasn't happened. I asked again today and Owen said that they weren't planning on answering our four questions anyway but that he would follow up to this list with a separate post. Jon McCann expressed resentment that we even asked anyone these questions. I have logs of the entire conversations regarding this topic should anyone care to revisit it but I think it best to just move on. If I could presume to summarize what we discussed during my begging in the middle of the week, their position is that Gnome 3.0 *is* Shell. Fortunately, that's completely compatible with what the majority said and what the practically reality is: Red Hat is spending the money and the man-power on setting the user experience agenda for 3.0.

My take:

All we, the Marketing Team, can bet on at this point, is Shell. And we can't do anything with it regarding video production until Red Hat tells us what their plans for freezing the user experience are. 3.0, otherwise, is a basket of high-risk features that may or may-not make the final release in some cases because they have not been started yet; in others, because there aren't enough people working on them.