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

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Mon, 2013-06-03 at 15:32 +0200, Mathieu Stumpf wrote:
> 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]

Except that you don't want to download 100 GB of songs to test a
software. Blank songs would compress to almost nothing, and more or less
to the size of the metadata once tarball'ed up. It should be possible to
offer tens of thousands of songs with a download size in megs, not gigs.

The construction of good test cases with the metdata is more important
than the contents of the files.