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[I sent this privately, but mimi suggested a public posting to spur
discussion] Hey Mimi, a few points of feedback... I went through the page/documents in the order they were on the page, trying to play the part of a user trying to learn what chandler is.. really trying to play naive.. 1) on a very simple, interacting-with-the-page level, I noticed: a) I had to choose between PPT and PDF - why can't these just be web pages? I don't see anything unique in these files that couldn't be represented with HTML... maybe this isn't true for everyone, but honestly whenever I see PDF I think to myself "ugh, then I have to wait for the PDF viewer to start, and wait for the file to download, yuck" b) from a community perspecitve, PPT and all other microsoft formats are simply going to give us some bad mojo. The open source community doesn't just hate closed formats, they actually look down on them. Even if we don't just offer HTML versions of these pages, I think we're better off with JUST pdf, rather than PPT and PDF. Think of it like the classic old lessons they tell businessmen going to china/etc - "Make sure not to show them the bottoms of your feet - its offensive" - same goes for Microsoft documents and open source communities :) (And to be honest, PDF in place of a web page gets a similar reaction, just not nearly as strong) 2) I liked the "target user" PDF - it grabbed me, got me interested - it was compelling. 3) I had some big problems with the virtuality document. I got very confused in the first few pages, then was really wowed by the next few pages. Then I took a step back and realized I hadn't really learned what chandler actually IS. I think the last screenshot on the 11th slide was the only place I started to "get it" - but frankly I was lost long before I got there. a) chandler has a history of over-promising and under-delivering. Every person I've ever met who has heard of us has been disappointed with where we are relative to the original vision. They ask me "what happened to the peer-to-peer stuff?" "why does it suck so much as an e-mail client?" - All things that OSAF made great proclamations about and then backed off from. This document describes where chandler will be in probably 2007 or 2008 - not because we don't want to be there, but because we have a LOT of code to write before we get to what you're describing. I'm really concerned about what chandler is promising to be. Slide 5 is especially compelling for a new users... but concerns me, as a member of OSAF, because we're claiming to do everything that all of these apps do, and they EACH took a team larger than ours YEARS to develop... and we're not going to be there for a LONG time. b) I don't like the 1st (4th?) person language - "We mean.." - I think framing in terms of chandler, not a specific group of people, is simply more professional. I started to ask myself, "who are they, that they "mean this" or "mean that"? c) I think the word "affordances" should be struck from all public documents. Its a very proprietary word in the design/UI world. I had actually never heard it until coming to OSAF though I understand now that there are certain environments where the word is well understood.. but the target user doesn't live in that environment :) (If we had the word "Python" anywhere in these documents, I'd have a similar opinion on that word :)) d) I think the first few slides are too abstract and too chandler-specific to be shown this early. I went from "ooh, manage all my information!" to "Attributes are Labels...." to "Attributes are typed into 6 categories" and "Chandler has 6 Kinds" What? is that even english? I think we've all gotten very used to using Kind as an almost-proper noun within the context of chandler, but even grammatically it's extremely awkward. Further, I think this breakdown of the building blocks of meta information is just too abstract. And specifically, "Attributes are Labels" might as well be "Labels are Attributes" or "Roads are Streets" or "Streets are Roads" - there's no added value here. And I didn't even know Kinds had subKinds until I saw it in your document :) e) while I appreciate the "Kinds are Sets of Attributes" panel, I think the diagram is a huge leap and is very difficult to wrap your brain around - I don't even think its necessary when introducing chandler. Maybe down the road when people understand how items interact, but this diagram is really wacky. f) when I finally got to the screenshot, I started to see what was going on, but it would have been nice to have seen this FIRST to at least understand what this magic abstraction looks like. .. but even the screenshot was very cluttered and I couldn't figure out what half of the icons were for. (And by the way, a bass clef for "Media"? very clever, but very esoteric :)) Maybe half of the problem with the Chandler Virtuality is that its really a "behind the scenes" look into how data relationships are managed - something to help people make that NEXT leap after they understand the basics that chandler keeps track of different kinds of data. You're explaining everything up front, without allowing people to wrap their heads around the basics. When teaching algebra for the first time, the explanation goes something like: x is an unknown variable. When you see things like "x + 5 = 10" you can figure out that x is really 5 - see, if it is 5, then the equation works out. You can also figure out x in other contexts, like "x * 2 = 20" or " x/4 = 3" Later, you might explain how there can be other variables, and learn how to solve for x, etc. But I feel like the virtuality presentation is more like saying: x is an unknown variable, in fact any letter or set of letters is an unknown variable. So, given any arbitrary function f and n different variables, f(x[1..n]) = K, its possible to determine the variables indexed in x by finding the inverse of f, called f-1, in terms of K. Basically, its too much all at once, making it too abstract, too hard to wrap your brain around if you've never seen all this before. I personally completely understand what each of your slides refers to.. but I don't think a new user, even a very smart knowledge worker, will. Anyhow, I hope that helps - I know its quite a bit of feedback :) Alec Mimi Yin wrote: The "Chandler in a Nutshell" presentation I sent out a few weeks ago has had a celebrity makeover and is now officially in the "Looking for feedback" stage. |
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