[Usability] Re: the same page

[Steve George <blah dircon co uk>]

Hi,

I'm not sure that I agree that there is some sort of trade-off to be made here
between performance and usability.

The fact is that the commonest reason given for not using GNOME by out current
likely userbase (ie traditional linux/unix users) is poor performance.

Presumably the point of 2.0 is that we now have the 'great' technology and
will be concentrating on user experience from now on.  I think everyone knows
what we risk if we don't improve the desktop.  All the improvements in the
world won't help if no-one uses the darn stuff!

So it seems to me that a bug fixing release would inherently also concentrate
on performance.

Overall though Seth, I agree with you, that we do need to communicate views of
what direction we are going in, and importantly how we are going to get there.

For example our userbase says that our environment is not integrated enough
but I'm not personally clear on what we are missing architecturally or even
how we would aim to get there.

Cheers,

Steve


On Wed, Dec 19, 2001 at 12:57:05AM -0800, Seth Nickell wrote:
<snip> 
> I think we should be talking about what direction we want GNOME to be
> heading and what things we want it to be able to do. It would be
> valuable for us to be communicating with eachother about how we see
> GNOME moving and what we want done with GNOME. 
> 
> For example... I was recently talking with Telsa and Jeff Waugh, both of
> whom felt it was really important for GNOME to run on older
> pentium-class machines because that is a market that has been largely
> abandoned by Microsoft and hence an opportunity. They also care about
> various "people" in that class of users (such as non-profits). All else
> being equal I would love for this to be true too, but given a choice
> between a desktop that was a) more usable or b) had more useful features
> and a system that ran on older machines I would choose the first two
> over the third. Maybe the conflict isn't inherent, but its an example of
> the subtle ways we are on "different pages".
<snip>