Thoughts on Eric Raymond's Insights

[Jef Spaleta]

Jonathan M. Gardner wrote:
> I think QA and usability tests are two different things

I'm not saying they are the same, I'm just pointing out
there is a lot of work to go around for potential volunteers.
I'll take whatever opportunities to recruit for the community based
efforts I care about...even if its at the expense of someone else's
idea...I'm evil like that. Everything is competent manpower limited.
And I plan to do what I can to make sure my pet projects take
as much of that limited resource as possible.... better hope you
convince me your idea is something i should add to my list of pet
projects.

> I see your point. I'll do an experiment at home. I have a lovely 
> wife who hates computers but uses them anyway. 

I would call that a bias. And from my point of view, the results of the
session with your wife aren't as important as the methodology
you use to pick the test-subject(your wife) and the methodology you use
to identify the usability issues you want to get feedback on, so that
your session can be repeated by others. If its not really
repeatable...the session with your wife is going to be nothing better
than a random osnews review, where personal preferences get expressed
without a meaningful framework of comparison. And we all know how much
traction those sorts of reviews in the media have on developer
thinking....

You are going to have to be extremely careful that you approach things
in a way that only addresses usability and not utility.
And actually, i would argue that you should attempt to address just
a single aspect of usability at a time. I really think this sums up
things in very broad strokes:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030825.html

But all the links here are of value:
http://fedora.redhat.com/participate/developers-guide/s1-ui-more-suggestions.html
particularly for you maybe this:
http://usability.gov/methods/usability_testing.html

> Are there any volunteers for a project that would be willing to 
> take the results of a usability study seriously?

Depends on how serious the usability study is....
And I doubt all the project developers actively read all the messages in
this list. You are going to have to be proactive and try to poke a few
developers in the eye who are leading projects that could use some help
with usability. Since the gnome people already have a usability project
listed...
http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/references.html
you might find a person associated with that who is willing to provide
some guidance.  KMail and Mozilla Mail and Evolution are all
upstream development issues, not under the direct control of Fedora
Project. You will have to start getting involved in the upstream
mailinglist and approach the developers on their home turf. 
redhat-config-network or as we like to call it now system-config-network
is the providence of:
http://fedora.redhat.com/projects/config-tools/
and has its own mailinglist. It's up to you to find out which project
would be most receptive to your experimentation.


> But in my experience, even though they don't turn out a great 
> volume of statistics with error bars or complete analysis of 
> the target market, they do give a lot of valuable feedback.

No offense, but for the sake of this discussion, its not clear how
valuable your personal experience is on this matter. And to be fair
its not clear how valuable my personal experience on this matter is
either. And in my experience, just saying 'in my experience' without
some noteworthy credentials or a working relationship with your audience
based on a good track-record of productive conversation doesn't help
convince people who are leaning towards a healthy level of criticism
when listening to your opinions. Its far better to cite references that
look authoritative. Even if they are crap, it at least shows you aren't
just talking only from a point of view of personal opinion and are
willing to do some research.  
 
-jef"looking forward to seeing your methodology"spaleta