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

[Luc Pionchon <pionchon luc gmail com>]

On 3 June 2013 08:48, Luc Pionchon <pionchon luc gmail com> wrote:
> 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.


To go forward, is there anybody involved in software design who wants
to step in?
now or later


Technically it should not be much more than a git module from which we
can get tarballs.
There should not be much processing involved. Maybe some i18n.