Re: [newbie] Suggestion to Mandrake
On Friday 26 October 2001 6:52 pm, you wrote: 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... -- Mandrake has a network of some 75 crashtesters based all over the world, these are not techies employed by Mandrake, they are ordinary users who have volunteered their time to test new releases/products etc. The benefit of this is that software is tested on a range of hardware rather than just the equipment available within Mandrake and it is tested by people whose skill and knowledge also varies - there are those who have a great deal of knowledge and some (such as me) who have a lesser amount of knowledge. This means that some things which would be obvious to a techie are not immediately obvious to an ordinary user and Mandrake are given the ordinary users feedback, suggestions are made and taken on board ( Xtart came about as a result of a problem encountered by one Crashtester). Crashtesters began with 8.0, continued with 8.1 and they are currently being tasked with testing in areas which are of specific interest to them, e.g. installation, networking, office products, Lilo Grub, commercial packages etc. Poogle Registered Linux user 182657 (added to sig for the benefit of those irritated by it) Want to buy your Pack or Services from MandrakeSoft? Go to http://www.mandrakestore.com
[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
RE: [newbie] Suggestion to Mandrake
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
