[Usability] UI engineering: use a database of user data

[Luc Pionchon <pionchon luc gmail com>]

GNOME could create and use a database of user data.


One thing that comes regularly when we see features/mockups/previews,
is that the software contains basically no data. As an example, here
the music player has 4 artists:

http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2013/05/29/some-gnome-3-9-sightings


Having “real life” datasets help to see how the software scales in
real environment.

In the case of an Artist list, as an example, you may have 50 artists
in your own music library. *Plus*, if you have 10 compilations (movie
soundtrack? dance compilation?) with each 30 individual artists , and
tadam… +300, your artist list is flooded with artists (whom you never
heard) with a single track. Your artist list becomes useless, although
it looked so nice and clean and easy on the mockups.

I suggest that GNOME set up a user data database to be used to test
and present applications in more real situations. Ideally there would
be several user profiles. The case of a fresh install (with basically
no user data) is definitely a case to take care of, but it is from far
not the most frequent.

Such database does not have to actually contain copyrighted content.
For example music files can contain white noise, or just be empty
files when it is just to demonstrate the organization features.

Same thing for movies, photos, contacts, documents, bookmarks, notes,
folder trees, etc.


On the same post, it is nice to see that gitg is presented with real
life data. (the opposite would have been a shame for a FLOSS project!)




Originally posted at
http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2013/05/29/some-gnome-3-9-sightings/#comment-663


mclasen says:
You are more than welcome to work on that.

luc says:
I can help, but it makes no sense to do it myself. This really should
be part of the design process, to see how an application scales, is it
robust to real data sets, to i18n, etc.