Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Máirín Duffy]

Hiiii,

So Jon said this:

"Grab one of us on IRC, IM, phone, train, email etc and make a case for
what you want to see.  Understand that this will be somewhat easier
once you've built up a reputation for being full of awesome.  But
mostly we need people with skill, vision, sanity, and positive energy
helping us make Fedora all that we know it can and will be.
Seriously, bring it.  You have great ideas?   Want to help form the
vision of the future of computing?  Show up, build trust, be awesome."

With this invitation I am wondering if anyone is interested in getting
involved, together with me. I have an idea (I talked to Jon about it
last week I think) for a project to help improve the Fedora experience
for our desktop users and I wanted to see if anyone is interested in
helping out:

= Improve our install experience =

Jon showed me last week how terrible our live media install experience
is. We definitely need to identify all the issues and work through ways
of improving it.

The installer itself, regardless of the live media installer, does need
some serious help, as does the firstboot application. The anaconda team
has put a lot of efforts in F11 and F12 towards a storage system
rewrite, and if you follow Planet Fedora you've likely seen some of my
mockups and discussion around the storage UI design improvements (I
think they won't hit F12 but should make F13):
http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/anaconda-advanced-storage-devices/ But
there's screens and scenarios those mockups don't cover - *plenty* of
room for improvement.

I spoke with Chris Lumens and Peter Jones on the anaconda team, and if
in the F13 time frame we can get some nice designs and usability
suggestions lined up, they said they would be happy to work with us to
get those improvements into F14. On top of this, such a project is a
good opportunity for folks to get involved in improving Fedora's overall
desktop experience - no matter what desktop environment camp you're in,
since anaconda and firstboot are a bit agnostic there. :)

Think you might be interested in helping out? Here's some suggestions on
how you could get involved:

- mmcgrath put together some videos of the install process on both f11
and ubuntu this week for another purpose, but he made them available in
case we wanted to do a comparative study. I could definitely use some
help going through these videos, taking notes on them, doing a
comparative analysis (sounds a lot scarier and harder than it actually
is, trust me), and brainstorming some solution to the issues we
identify. The videos are here:

http://mmcgrath.fedorapeople.org/compare/

- We now have a usability lab, and it would be cool to put anaconda and
firstboot through some tests using it. :) Even though the usability lab
equipment is here in my office and you're not, there's a ton of work
that goes into usability testing that doesn't involve the equipment -
especially the up-front prep work. One of the most important work items
for this is putting together a task script for the usability tests.
Here's the script we're using for the Fedora Community tests as an example:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraCommunity/UsabilityTestingRound1/TestScript

You can even run through the testing script on your own without the
fancy-pants equipment. Grab your friends or your family and help
contribute to the data pool!

Of course once we've got some data I'll need some help going through
them and doing the analysis work. Here's an example of this
work-in-progress for the Fedora Community usability tests:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraCommunity/UsabilityTestingRound1/AnalysisAndTakeaways

If you are interested in either of these work items, reply here or drop
me and email and we can set up a time to chat. You don't have to be a
developer or a designer to do this work, and it would help make a big
positive impact in our user experience. If you work with me to identify
the problems and brainstorm some solutions, I promise you some of my
design time to create mockups so we can then make a case to the
developers to make those improvements happen.

Please please please give it a try :)

~m