Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Sun, 2006-08-06 at 14:39 -0800, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
> On 8/6/06, Damien Durand <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > I need feedback, if you're interested to contribute feel free to add your
> > name in the usability group :
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DamienDurand/Usability/UsabilityGroup
> 
> I STRONGLY  suggest that you make a sincere and very comprehensive
> effort to touch base with the people working on the upstream desktop
> usability level.  I honestly do not see how a fedora centric project
> is going to work inside the framework of the decisions which are being
> made upstream inside the desktop projects. Striking out on your own to
> "fix" usability inside fedora without understanding how the desktop
> usability decisions impact the fedora experience, is going to do very
> little but become an ultimately frustrating and fruitless waste of
> time for you.. unless there is very clearly defined relationship
> between what the fedora centric group is doing to support the
> usability vision of the upstream desktop projects and how the fedora
> centric work is moved upstream. There are very few "right" answers in
> usability in the limit of a large population. You need to make damn
> sure that your vision for Fedora usability works inside the upstream
> vision for the desktop project you are looking to impact.  The very
> very last thing you want to do is have Fedora specific usability
> changes to be stuck as fedora specific patches. Tie you mission
> statement to specific "deliverables" that the desktop projects are
> looking for help with upstream.

+1 from where I sit.  I don't see what this project plan accomplishes
that can't be solved by (1) working with upstream, and (2) filing bugs
or working through the existing Triage.

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 08:53 +0800, Steven James Drinnan wrote:
> My experience with linux is limited but I do know the importance of good
> usability of a computer program - if people can not intuitively figure
> out how do something then that is a problem - 1 area is networking
> -though a  lot of improvements have been made there is still a lot of
> bugs - (eg on my laptop sometimes the eth0 and eth1 (wired and wirless)
> get transposed or network manager decides to create a new ethernet
> device- there are a few other issues but not the time here.
> 
> We are humans after all not dolphins. We all think in a particular way.
> And need to make operations more smother. One good example is Add remove
> programs and Software Updater

Have you filed bugs?

> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back. 

The first is what Marketing is for.  The second is what Bugzilla is for.

> There are few ideas i have but i would like to stress, lets not reinvent
> the wheel, if there is a system in place lets use it to its full
> potential.

Right on!

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Damien Durand]

Well, this project is now official, please use the fedora-desktop list to speak about it or join #fedora-usability channel. I'm sorry for this but 
it is to avoid the multiplication of malls on different list.Thanks in advanceDamien Durand2006/8/8, Paul W. Frields <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:On Mon, 2006-08-07 at 08:53 +0800, Steven James Drinnan wrote:
> My experience with linux is limited but I do know the importance of good> usability of a computer program - if people can not intuitively figure> out how do something then that is a problem - 1 area is networking
> -though a  lot of improvements have been made there is still a lot of> bugs - (eg on my laptop sometimes the eth0 and eth1 (wired and wirless)> get transposed or network manager decides to create a new ethernet
> device- there are a few other issues but not the time here.>> We are humans after all not dolphins. We all think in a particular way.> And need to make operations more smother. One good example is Add remove
> programs and Software UpdaterHave you filed bugs?> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back.The first is what Marketing is for.  The second is what Bugzilla is for.
> There are few ideas i have but i would like to stress, lets not reinvent> the wheel, if there is a system in place lets use it to its full> potential.Right on!--Paul W. Frields, RHCE  
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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le Mar 8 août 2006 13:14, Paul W. Frields a écrit :

>> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back.
>
> The first is what Marketing is for.  The second is what Bugzilla is for.

I strongly disagree.

1. The weight of a Fedora bugzilla report is pretty low,

2. A lot of Fedora packagers consider it's not their job to push user
reports upstream.

3. Using upstream bugzilla is asking to be ignored - any feature evolution
(and usability fixes are always considered feature evolutions) will be
discussed in mailing lists/irc channels by developpers between themselves.
Not in the bugzilla where the reporter can follow the discussion. Then
when the user complains after a few months he'll be informed the decision
was taken somewhere else without leaving him any opportunity to make his
case or asking seriously fo his input. (and you and I know old bugzilla
bugs will be ignored forever, since if they were important, someone would
have acted on them before)

Which means any problematic interaction between app A, B and C (typical
usability problem) requires users:

1. to be able to locate the A, B, C forums where usability is discussed

2. to join them, learn the mood and discussion conventions

3. to convince A, B, C to work together (with zero credentials "just basic
user report"), probably at an inconvenient date for upstream

ie requires a *lot* of time, communication skills, mastery of technical
english, etc

Practically that means that without any group support a user report will
go nowhere. Even if he found a perfectly valid problem.

Distributions which create usability SIGs are able to influence upstream
evolution the way their users need. They help formalise user reports in
clean technical english. They are able to gather data and numbers that can
not be waved away like an individual user-level report often is if
upstream deems it inconvenient.

Distributions which don't are only represented by their developpers, who
are supposed to represent distro users but in practice only push their
personal agenda (which may be good or bad but has often little in common
with the wishes of users)

No usability group gave us most of the UI gems of early GNOME 2, and an
awful lot of the bad reputation GNOME and Fedora still suffer from (GNOME
is not Fedora but Fedora/Red Hat people were certainly major players in
the decision making process then).

Till Fedora developpers/maintainers consider usability problems bugs (to
be fixed) and not "enhancements" (to be ignored at will), someone else
needs to mediate between Fedora users and all the upstreams Fedora
distributes.

Lastly this kind of group is a major generator of user goodwill - "let the
users engage upstream alone" leads to the kind of Fedora-bashing articles
we've seen lately.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[David Barzilay]

Hi Damien,

> Well, this project is now official

How did you accomplish that?

Thanks for clarifying!

Best regards,
--
David Barzilay
FAMSCO Member
Brazilian Fedora Ambassador

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Re: Preparation of Fedora T-shirts

[Jack Aboutboul]

On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 14:58 -0400, Max Spevack wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Jul 2006, Pawel Sadowski wrote:
> 
> > On 27/07/2006 Karlie Robinson wrote:
> >
> >> Have you talked with the vendor about Sponsoring the shirts?  As in
> >> you
> >> would they be willing to cover part of the costs of the shirts for
> >> your
> >> Fedora events if their logo was included on the shirt?
> >>
> >> You want to give away 200 shirts, that's 200 people walking around
> >> with
> >> an advert for the vendor - there is value there.
> >
> > Hmm, it can be a good idea. I will try to find some local vendor willing
> > to cover part of the costs.
> 
> In addition, please keep me in the loop, and I can work with FAMSCO and 
> discuss helping with the costs.  If you want to get tshirts made locally, 
> that's a fantastic idea, and I am supportive of that.

Right on.  The event kit should be debuting in time for this thursday's
meeting.  Check it out for additional information regarding graphics
approval and how to go about getting costs covered.

Jack

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Paul W. Frields]

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 14:53 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Mar 8 août 2006 13:14, Paul W. Frields a écrit :
> 
> >> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back.
> >
> > The first is what Marketing is for.  The second is what Bugzilla is for.
> 
> I strongly disagree.
[...snip...]

Thank you Nicolas, this is the first substantial discussion I've seen on
this topic.  I really have no opposition to a SIG for this work, but I
want to see it hashed out on the appropriate lists transparently, not
unilaterally announced.  Unless I missed the big discussion elsewhere --
which is possible; unlike the superhuman Rahul, I monitor only a subset
of the work going on!  (I don't know how he does it, honestly.)

SIGs should be working under the umbrella of one of the existing
subprojects.  I'd like to see that happening, to insure the work is
monitored and supported correctly.  If Marketing is not the correct
umbrella, this discussion should be started on the list for the correct
one.

-- 
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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 08 août 2006 à 15:18 -0400, Paul W. Frields a écrit :
> On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 14:53 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Le Mar 8 août 2006 13:14, Paul W. Frields a écrit :
> > 
> > >> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back.
> > >
> > > The first is what Marketing is for.  The second is what Bugzilla is for.
> > 
> > I strongly disagree.
> [...snip...]
> 
> Thank you Nicolas, this is the first substantial discussion I've seen on
> this topic.  I really have no opposition to a SIG for this work, but I
> want to see it hashed out on the appropriate lists transparently, not
> unilaterally announced.

The appropriate list is certainly the desktop one, as any cli/server
usability problem is very low prio nowadays. However since it's been
almost dead lately I don't think discussing it directly there would have
had any effect.

>  Unless I missed the big discussion elsewhere --

I missed it too :)
I only rationalised why a usability group would be useful, I have little
idea if it's the kind of usability group proposed today.

Also I have my fingers in enough pies today I hope someone will take up
the program and make it real, but I've little time to contribute myself.
Though this is a direct result of trying to engage upstream alone as
we're supposed to do nowadays.

Regards,

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot


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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Máirín Duffy]

Nicolas Mailhot wrote:

Also I have my fingers in enough pies today I hope someone will take up
the program and make it real, but I've little time to contribute myself.
Though this is a direct result of trying to engage upstream alone as
we're supposed to do nowadays.


Are there any other distro-specific usability groups out there?

I'm kind of confused at the goal of a distro-specific usability group. 
Doesn't it make more sense to work with an upstream usability group such 
as the GNOME Usability Project (which is somewhat dormant AFICT)? Has 
someone tried to engage upstream via projects such as this and met with 
resistance? (this is the feeling I get from your email?)


Where I see a distro-specific usability group being useful:

- Software update tool usability (because different distros handle this 
differently)
- Infrastructure usability (e.g. usability of the Fedora website(s), 
account system, bugzilla, etc.)


But neither appears to be the goal...?

~m

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Nicolas Mailhot]

Le mardi 08 août 2006 à 16:08 -0400, Máirín Duffy a écrit :
> Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> > Also I have my fingers in enough pies today I hope someone will take up
> > the program and make it real, but I've little time to contribute myself.
> > Though this is a direct result of trying to engage upstream alone as
> > we're supposed to do nowadays.
> 
> Are there any other distro-specific usability groups out there?

Novell I think has an active usability project

> I'm kind of confused at the goal of a distro-specific usability group. 
> Doesn't it make more sense to work with an upstream usability group such 
> as the GNOME Usability Project (which is somewhat dormant AFICT)? Has 
> someone tried to engage upstream via projects such as this and met with 
> resistance? (this is the feeling I get from your email?)

The problem is actual users won't have "GNOME problems" or "KDE
problems" or "OO.o problems". They'll have Fedora user problems.

So if on Monday a user hits a usability problem in OO.o we ask him to
integrate the OO.o ecosystem.

On Tuesday frustrated with OO.o he tries koffice (he didn't set up
fixing OO.o after all - he want to make it work within Fedora not wait
months before the next OO.o release). It works but then there is another
problem which wasn't present in OO.o. We'll tell him "finished digesting
OO.o upstream - try KDE now"

And so on.

(you'll note that when a user reports a crash we don't ask him to report
upstream directly - if we followed this logic we know perfectly well a
lot of problems would never be fixed satisfactorily)

Who there has enough time to follow every single Fedora list and IRC
channel? On the usability front we're asking users to do an effort
several orders of magnitude higher - engage with every single upstream
they may use as part of their everyday Fedora experience. That's not
realistic.

Red Hat/Fedora moved from a "patch everything to accommodate Red Hat
customer wishes" to "use as vanilla upstream as possible". This is all
well and good but I don't see why using vanilla upstream should prevent
the Fedora community as a whole from telling upstream what we wish in
the next release. Other distributions are not afraid to do so.

This requires actively collecting and discussing problems at the distro
level. Sadly almost never done in Fedora - the sole exception I remember
was the new print tool requirements. The influence of Fedora as a user
community over upstream is so diffuse one can ask if it even exists at
all.

> Where I see a distro-specific usability group being useful:
> 
> - Software update tool usability (because different distros handle this 
> differently)
> - Infrastructure usability (e.g. usability of the Fedora website(s), 
> account system, bugzilla, etc.)
> 
> But neither appears to be the goal...?

Apart from the general "help bridge the gap between upstream and users"
you need to consider the following.

A usability problem means "it works technically but it's awkward for
me". So:
1. there is a way to get the job done nevertheless - making it not worth
spending the time reporting if it's difficult (and unless you already
work with the affected upstream it will be)
2. lone reports may be subjective

You can only do good usability work by correlating many user reports. If
you make it hard enough for reports to percolate upstream, the few which
make it will be dismissed as "non representative" especially if they
don't fit in the user abstraction upstream devs have (if they did fit in
it chances are the problem would never have happened in the first place)

One major usability problem is inter-app inconsistency.
By definition this kind of problem impacts many different upstreams.
And it's dependant on the actual software collection the user runs.

The Fedora context is very specific - we refuse to ship many apps which
are good enough legal-wise for competing distros. Therefore our users
won't have the same problems as a distro who ships mplayer instead of
totem for example. Similarly the userbase of a project like OO.o will
span several operating systems, so Fedora usability priorities won't map
to OO.o usability priorities, and if Fedora does not make the effort to
make its case loudly OO.o will just develop for their biggest port -
Windows.

And so on. 

-- 
Nicolas Mailhot


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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Steven James Drinnan]

On Tue, 2006-08-08 at 14:53 +0200, Nicolas Mailhot wrote:
> Le Mar 8 août 2006 13:14, Paul W. Frields a écrit :
> 
> >> We have a great product. That needs promoting and user feed back.
> >
> > The first is what Marketing is for.  The second is what Bugzilla is for.
> 
> I strongly disagree.
> 
> 1. The weight of a Fedora bugzilla report is pretty low,
> 
> 2. A lot of Fedora packagers consider it's not their job to push user
> reports upstream.
> 
> 3. Using upstream bugzilla is asking to be ignored - any feature evolution
> (and usability fixes are always considered feature evolutions) will be
> discussed in mailing lists/irc channels by developpers between themselves.
> Not in the bugzilla where the reporter can follow the discussion. Then
> when the user complains after a few months he'll be informed the decision
> was taken somewhere else without leaving him any opportunity to make his
> case or asking seriously fo his input. (and you and I know old bugzilla
> bugs will be ignored forever, since if they were important, someone would
> have acted on them before)
> 
> Which means any problematic interaction between app A, B and C (typical
> usability problem) requires users:
> 
> 1. to be able to locate the A, B, C forums where usability is discussed
> 
> 2. to join them, learn the mood and discussion conventions
> 
> 3. to convince A, B, C to work together (with zero credentials "just basic
> user report"), probably at an inconvenient date for upstream
> 
> ie requires a *lot* of time, communication skills, mastery of technical
> english, etc
> 
> Practically that means that without any group support a user report will
> go nowhere. Even if he found a perfectly valid problem.
> 
> Distributions which create usability SIGs are able to influence upstream
> evolution the way their users need. They help formalise user reports in
> clean technical english. They are able to gather data and numbers that can
> not be waved away like an individual user-level report often is if
> upstream deems it inconvenient.
> 
> Distributions which don't are only represented by their developpers, who
> are supposed to represent distro users but in practice only push their
> personal agenda (which may be good or bad but has often little in common
> with the wishes of users)
> 
> No usability group gave us most of the UI gems of early GNOME 2, and an
> awful lot of the bad reputation GNOME and Fedora still suffer from (GNOME
> is not Fedora but Fedora/Red Hat people were certainly major players in
> the decision making process then).
> 
> Till Fedora developpers/maintainers consider usability problems bugs (to
> be fixed) and not "enhancements" (to be ignored at will), someone else
> needs to mediate between Fedora users and all the upstreams Fedora
> distributes.
> 
> Lastly this kind of group is a major generator of user goodwill - "let the
> users engage upstream alone" leads to the kind of Fedora-bashing articles
> we've seen lately.
> 
> Regards,
> 

My thoughts exactly, bugzilla is great to fix a particular problem but
it does not address what users needs are.

Steven

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Jeremy Hogan]

On 8/8/06, Steven James Drinnan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
My thoughts exactly, bugzilla is great to fix a particular problem butit does not address what users needs are.
What about Featurezilla? 

--jeremy 

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Re: [Fedora-marketing-list] Fedora usability : a new project?

[Rahul]

Jeremy Hogan wrote:
On 8/8/06, *Steven James Drinnan* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] 
> wrote:



My thoughts exactly, bugzilla is great to fix a particular problem but
it does not address what users needs are.


What about Featurezilla?



Thanks but no thanks.

Rahul

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