I agree 10,000% - I've been saying this for about a year now (since being
heavily involved with linux). The typcial response to this is "hey, it's
open source, you should participate in the testing and give your feedback to
Mandrake" which is great, but like you I would like to see more formal users
group tests. However, this all comes back down to money. One rumour I
heard was the the Mandrake development team is comprised of 6 guys slaving
away (don't know how true this is), but most certainly they don't have the
resources to do full user testing.
How about this though? Would anyone like to see a Mandrake User's Group
conference kind of like they do for business folks like Nortel and Cisco.
If you've never heard of or been to one its usually a 2 or 3 day conference
when a company (like Mandrake for example) reserves a big hotel room and
they have these really (hopefully) intensive question and answer sessions
directly with the users. It's usually kind of pricey but can be pretty
cool.
Another spin on this would be to have local LUGs host formal user testing
sessions with Jane and John Doe. It could be quite cool, for example, you
could ask your public library if you could set up 3 or 4 systems in one of
their conference rooms one weekend and have an open QA systems testing and
do some formal data gathering to report back to Mandrake. This not only
would help Mandrake out but could also expose the public to linux even more
(which could be a good and a bad thing -- it might turn some folks off real
fast).
If there is anyone out there that knows how to do formal user interface QA
testing I'd be interesting in knowing how to do that. Also, the areas the
need to be QA'd from a non-techie user point of view . For example:
- system installation
- using the office products
- using internet products
- basic system configuration 101 that everyone needs to know (what
would that entail?)
- (what else?)
Anyway, just some of my thoughts...
ps: my thought it Mandrake already knows where the short commings are but
just don't have the time and or money resources to address them, so they
just give it their best effort.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Loke Kit Kai [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Friday, October 26, 2001 12:52 PM
> To: Mandrake List (E-mail)
> Subject: [newbie] Suggestion to Mandrake
>
>
> Hi...
> Guys, am I right to say that when user interface is
> being tested, so far,
> it is the techies that are doing the testing and evaluating
> about the user
> friendlyness of the OS and about the control you have over ur system.
> I think u guys should now start involving home users,
> users that aren't
> even familiar with windows interface, and get their
> evaluation, to provide
> the experience that home users are looking for, and yet
> provide the control
> that techies are looking for...
> Why? because for me, Mandrake 8.1, was a bad
> impression, because I change
> the default shell to Cshell, and yet, all the basics commands
> like ls are
> not working... I still haven't solve that as I'm having
> exams... but got a
> lot of help from Tim and Steve... but if u really want to see
> Mandrake or
> Linux win over markets dominated by microsoft, it's time to
> involve the home
> users whom are equally important if not more, as techies made
> up only a
> small fraction of computer users.
> Let's work together to make Microsoft wake up its idea...
>
>
>
Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft?
Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
