Re: [Usability] Reaching Users

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On 8 Dec 2009, at 12:13, Karl Lattimer wrote:

> I largely agree with this, making a usability improvement via the bug
> tracker means the maintainer or developer needs to understand your
> complaint, agree with it and find the time to implement it. 
> 
> This isn't ideal

Indeed it's not.  On the other hand, getting usability issues recognised as being as severe and necessary to fix as functionality issues was a great step forward when it first started to happen in GNOME 8 or 9 years ago.  And bugzilla probably was the best way to do that at that time, because making developers acutely aware of those issues was part of the initial education process.

Nowadays we could probably do something better, but that said, I've yet to see any usability issue tracking system that I particularly like, and/or that is different enough from a good bug reporting system to make it worth the effort of learning two similar-but-different systems just to keep them separate.  It's certainly something worth talking about, though.

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Interaction Designer     Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            OpenSolaris Desktop Team
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Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems