Re: Gathering small usability suggestions

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 8:33 AM, James Richard Tyrer <tyrerj@xxxxxxx> wrote:

Celeste Lyn Paul wrote:
> 2009/7/26 Bogdan Bivolaru <bogdan.bivolaru@xxxxxxxxx

> <mailto:bogdan.bivolaru@xxxxxxxxx>>

>
>     Hello,
>
>     Have you figured a way to gather small usability issue reports from
>     users?
>     I thought using KDE Brainstorm to publish my idea is a good way and
>     I tagged my issue [usability], what do you think?
>     Could someone on the list help review the issues tagged [usability]
>     in KDE Brainstorm? Or, you're already doing it?
>
>
> I'm not really a supporter of gathering usability issues directly from
> users since they can only experience issues and not analyze them and are
> inadvertently biased towards themselves and don't have knowledge of the
> entire system. But the "users are designers" issue is getting off topic.
>

Well, yes and no.  While we should not rely on users to do the actual
design work, it is very important to collect information from users as
we do said design work.  So, we do need users to report things which
they feel are hard to use, and perhaps even provide their ideas on how
these things might be improved.  In engineering, finding the fault is at
least half of the job.

Yes we need to involve users -- participatory activities are necessary for user-centered design. That does not imply that we need users doing self-reporting. Gathering specific user data that we need to solve a particular design problem is infinitely more useful than trying to analyze unstructured and hope we find a pattern -- which we would have to go out and validate with another study anyway.
 

This should be regarded the same as brainstorming; if 10% of the ideas
are good, then this is a very good result.  IAC, I always find it useful
to know what users think although I do not always take their advice.

It depends. It is a waste of my time to sift through all of the Brainstorm activities to find those 10% which might be useful in some way. I can do something much more useful with the time it takes to do that. But for someone else who is just getting started with this stuff, it would be more useful than doing nothing.
 

       Free advice costs you nothing and it is worth the price.

               Alan Sherman.

--
James Tyrer

Linux (mostly) From Scratch

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-- 
Celeste Lyn Paul
KDE e.V. Board Member
KDE Usability Project
www.kde.org
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