Re: [Usability] Reaching Users

[kerberos piestar net]

I'll try to explain where I am coming from.

About a year ago I was working on a custom CMS designed to be rolled  
out across a few medium sized sites.  Eventually I got a working  
prototype ready and was really pleased with it - and then passed it to  
the eventual users for some initial feedback.  They came back with a  
laundry list of complaints - large amounts of which I felt were unjust  
at the time (many of them were to me too niggly to matter about).  But  
since I was being paid I had no choice but to address these issues,  
and once I understood the users thinking that led to them saying what  
they said and addressed it the software was massively better as a  
result.

There seems to be no such process in FOSS though.  There never seems  
to be much support for ideas to go in the other direction and  
everything is handled as a 'bug'.  Sure there are 'idea pits' like  
Brainstorm, but they are too general purpose and cover new  
off-the-wall ideas rather than the simple basics.

As an example from Gnome (I do not know if it is still this way) take  
rearranging items on the panels.  You must right click to unlock,  
move, then re-lock each and every item.  It also relies on the RMB (a  
usability nono). It also doesn't feature snapping so you have to spend  
ages trying to get everything aligned correctly.  There are so many  
ways it could be improved upon and such behaviour I do not believe  
would ever make it past Apple (or even MS) QA.  Sure it's a small  
niggle, but small niggles add up until you feel you are fighting the  
machine at every step.

My point, fundamentally, is very little effort is made to engage with  
users to address their needs and complaints.  If someone wants to  
point out a problem they have to track down the right person and try  
to get them to pay attention, usually in a highly regimented,  
technical, environment.

If you are already in the trenches then I can understand that you may  
think that my opinion is without merit, but speaking as an outsider I  
just do not feel that there is sufficient communication with the  
userbase.  At the moment my only hope of 'contributing' is to chuck  
ideas into a brainstorm style pit which seems entirely pointless.

ESR wrote a great article about this years ago -  
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/cups-horror.html (plus the follow up).   
Essentially the problems with cups was affecting huge numbers of  
people, but the developers were never really aware until this point  
that there was even a problem.  It took a massively popular post by  
one of the founding fathers of FOSS to raise attention to the issue.

Quoting Andre Klapper <ak-47 gmx net>:

> Am Dienstag, den 08.12.2009, 11:27 +0000 schrieb kerberos piestar net:
> > Barrier 1: The majority of Linux distro's (Ubuntu and Suse to name
> > two) have no place on their forum for discussing ideas or engaging the
> > community
>
> Erm, http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/ and https://features.opensuse.org/ ?
> And what exactly is the URL for "their forum" you are refering to?
>
> After reading all this I still don't get your point. So, summarized to
> three sentences, what's the issue and your proposal?
>
> andre
>
> --
>  mailto:ak-47 gmx net | failed
>  http://www.iomc.de/  | http://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper