For Translation: ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Andre Schnabel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Apr 9, 2006 5:12 AM Subject: Re: [qa-dev] A proposal to improve the bug entry page for "simple users" To: [email protected]
Hi Mike, > Much of the information needed to improve usability is accessible, mainly in > the issues database, though I agree it's a mess to get at it. The challenge > though seems to be as much to influence the hearts and minds of those > setting priorities so that more weight is placed on usability. > I absolutely agree, but this needs time and a lot of (human) ressources. We have 5000+ unhandeled feature request, some of them have been reviewed by community members but have never been touched by developers. > As one possible practical way of going forward, perhaps the community could > declare a forthcoming release (2.0.4?) as a 'usability release' and include > in it a range of relevant issue resolutions. I'd certainly be willing to do > some trawling to identify possible candidate issues. I guess that adding a > comment something like 'please consider raising the priority of this issue > to 2.0.x for usability reasons' would be a sufficient prompt to the owners, > leaving them in full control. I'd be tempted to focus primarily on Writer > (because it is the most heavily used) though not to the complete exclusion > of other components. Clearly some issues would be generic anyway. > Yes, this would be a way to proceed. But ... again thre is a lot to do, to get the finger on it, to have the right arguments, to have people (developers) convinced, why usability is important, where we get the idea from, why we think something is more usable this way than that way. (Prepare for endlsess discussions) > Would it make sense to invent some kind of marker for usability, whether a > flag or a key word so that over time these issues were easier to identify? > No.. not as long, as we have an agreement, that somebody (from development) will give those issues a higher priority (as said, we had something like this a year ago .. some community members worked on features, with the only effect, that they are now of a better quality and assigned to requirements. ) > How do I judge whether or not there is sufficient support to make it worth > putting in some effort? Is there a better way to approach usability? Is this > the right place to canvas for collaborators? > The problem is, that I have no idea, how to prevent our main contributors from wasting money. It is great to hear, that a usability studiy has been sponsored (issues based on this study are filed). But most of the results could have been get by asking the community in a coordinated way. We do have a lot of trainers, teachers, people who do migration, who see how new users work with OOo, where they fail and what the key issues for them are. At the other hand ... a usability study is good to have. But we (community) cannot discuss about the results, as we don't know anything about the study (but the issues that have been filed). Coordinating this all would take a lot more than some discussions at a mailing list (esp. if you don't have a focused Mailing list). It would take a team to coordinate, to implement a process, establish some agreement and after all having something like a "trusted team". So .. all I want to say is, that usability is considered as important. And we all (ok, many of us) take care about usability. But every team does this in it's own way. To coordinate this efforts would be, what I named "usability project". André PS.: For some more background information, you might read the council log at http://tmp.janik.cz/OpenOffice.org/CC-2006-03-30.txt (relevant discussion ist starting at 9:06:38 ) --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
