User Observation Hackfest!

This post was made with another stylesheet and it might be messed up!

Many like to say that Gnome developers aren’t listening to the users, or simply don’t care about the user’s opinion at all, but another example is coming to contradict this.

In the context of the openSUSE summit that will take place from 21 to 23 of September, a team of Gnome developers will find some time to go on a day trip to the City of Largo, Florida, where there is a public-sector deployment of Gnome…

Goal

Gnome developers will watch and talk to normal people who use Gnome on a day-to-day basis, to see how Gnome works for them. The goal is to determine what the most important usability problems are, use usability testing tools to see how users respond to Gnome 3 and Work on a prototypal version of Gnome’s Pattern Language based on what works well for users!

I don’t know what will be the size of the user base that will participate on this, or how much experienced they are with Gnome, or even if they use Gnome DE to do a variety of tasks or a very specific set required for their work, but whatever the case I believe this could provide the developers with some useful information and certainly shows their attitude towards getting feedback.

Participants

The observating group consists of the following well-known Gnome developers:

Cosimo Cecchi
Jan Holesovsky
Federico Mena Quintero
Fabiana Simões
Manish Sinha (not confirmed yet)
Jasper St. Pierre
Anna Zacchi

It would be very interesting to see the results shown on a Gnome Pattern Language for user interfaces. We will keep an eye on that and inform you as soon as the hackfest is over.

User Observation Hackfest in GnomeLive

http://kidwm.net/ WM

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=682744
They even don’t care about Developers,
How would you think they care about users?
- alex285
  
  I read your blog. Well, I think direct contact can change some things.
  - http://kidwm.net/ WM
    
    Thanks for reply.
    But that is not my blog, I’m just a angry user, not that betrayed developer.
    - alex285
      
      Oh I see. Still the same answer. I guess personal communication will make things better.
- foobaro
  
  Software is always a moving target. Maintainers are patching code out of their modules every day. I recently checked the source of a compiler I fixed several times and couldn’t find 70% of the code I contributed anymore. This is how developing software works in closed source project as well. You patch something during the maintaining cycle several times and you kick parts of it out when the cycle ends.
  
  This has nothing to do with caring about someone or something.
  - foobaro
    
    (I actually dropped more than 6000 lines of my own code today during a cleanup-routine.)
    - alex285
      
      ?!? Who are you?
      - foobar
        
        Those lines are related to my employment. I only pushed ~10 lines to gnome related stuff today. It’s just an general example how often code gets dropped. :)
      - alex285
        
        I see. But still it would be nice if you can comment with real name and email. It is obvious that you are in Gnome development from your comments. And we sometimes need to contact these people. But of course is your call :)
      - foobar
        
        I don’t mind to share my identity with you and your team. I’m only a weekend developer who tries to cover some areas no one else wants to cover. My contributions are mostly directed to developers to ease their work. I don’t think I’m much use for a user centric page like yours.
        
        However, I do not plan to use my real name / mail in comments to keep spam down and to allow me to write quick and dirty comments without getting personally judged for my poor grammar & phrasing. :)
      - alex285
        
        Fair!
        *If they were geeks enough, they would know that is Google’s fault :)
  - hb
    
    It’s not about dropping code. It’s about communication, cooperation, and basic social interaction principles.
    
    And I know how software development works in closed source projects. I am working in the industry during my day job myself. And that doesn’t need to look like in the Nautilus project. In fact, if it would at my current work place, I would switch jobs.
foobar

I love to see that our folks is doing proper usability testing out there. This is exactly the right way how to do it. You don’t read blogs and comments to judge whether something is good or nut but you rather do your best to crop the task down to a more scientific but still practical level.

Can’t wait to read the results / take a closer look at the methods used to gather the information.
http://kidwm.net/ WM

Thank you guys.
I love nautilus 3.6, and I seldom use the extra pane feature.
I am just angry about why they didn’t give an acceptable alternative solution but pretend that this is not so important to explain.
http://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2012/08/30/on-nautilus/
Sorry for my ranting here, BTW
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=681004
I don’t think this will be a good or acceptable solution for extra pane feature.
Bob

This sounds like a really good idea.

But If it turns out that cooperate Gnome 3.0 don’t use workspaces, then I don’t hope that the developers use this survey to abolish workspaces completely in Gnome.
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