Re: Gathering small usability suggestions

On Monday 27 July 2009 13:33:53 James Richard Tyrer 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.
>
> 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.
>
In principle I agree with you.  However, you know as well as I do that very 
many 'bug reports' are in fact wishes, to make one particular person's work-
flow improve.  I don't see any way of educating the general body of users to 
understand that better for oneself is not necessarily in improvement for all.

It's my guess that the usability team does not have the spare man-power to do 
the two jobs that would be mandatory if this were in place -

1) Triage
2) Explain each idea rejection in a way that would keep the users happy and 
coming back with more and better ideas.

Anne
-- 
New to KDE4? - get help from http://userbase.kde.org
Just found a cool new feature?  Add it to UserBase

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.

_______________________________________________
kde-usability mailing list
kde-usability@xxxxxxx
https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability