Re: [Usability] Overthinking things.

[kerberos piestar net]

Quoting Charline <charline poirier canonical com>:

> This approach seems right.  We do have to ask ourselves, why do users
> not volunteer their usability experience?

In my experience, and one of the points I tried to convey in my first  
post here, is that users have nowhere to actually volunteer their  
usability experiences.  The Ubuntuforums and the majority of Linux  
forums treat criticism as either off-topic or trolling and try to  
stamp it out, or it gets turned into a Linux vs Windows thing.  I  
tried reporting my experiences and issues when I did a test roll out  
of a couple of Ubuntu boxes in my cafe - needless to say it did not go  
well - usability and critical discussions are banned apparently.

I do not think it's so much that users do not volunteer their  
experiences, rather than they are largely not welcome.

The main issue with the community is that they are emotionally  
invested in Linux and the resulting movement so see criticism of it as  
criticism of themselves (and take it personally) causing most attempts  
at honest feedback to result in a flamewar - through no real fault of  
anyones.

In seriousness I would suggest some form of project to reach out and  
find out why people are not using Linux - at the moment the attention  
seems to be on listening to the happy people, which seems a bit  
redundant.  If anything it would inject some realism into the debate.