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

[Mathieu Stumpf <psychoslave culture-libre org>]

Le 2013-06-03 07:48, Luc Pionchon a écrit :
> 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.

There are plenty of good free/libre songs out there, you know?[1] What 
about picking some? To my mind, it would be just natural to provide some 
of them with nowaday distributions. In fact, that would a good anchor to 
add a "open in ${SONG_EDITOR}" feature and encourage users to embrace 
the free/libre philosophy behind just free software.

Free Software is not enough for a Free Society: we need Free Arts and 
Free Cultures.

[1] And I exclude CC-*-nc when I say free/libre. Yes, there also real 
bad free/libre songs, just like anywhere.
Here is an archive that you may mirror to get some songs :
http://download.tuxfamily.org/cls/
rsync://download.tuxfamily.org/cls/
ftp://download.tuxfamily.org/cls/

> 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.

Wikimedia commons and archive.org have plenty of them.

> 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.
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