Thoughts on Eric Raymond's Insights - devel - Fedora mailing-lists

1 Mar 2004


      I'm thinking of how we as a Fedora team can take the ball that ESR has 
identified -- REAL usuability -- and runn with it in a meaningful way.
Here at Fedora, we are really 2 teams. There are the "Morlocks" who are 
underground, fixing things, pulling magical levers and making things work 
-- generally subscribed to fedora-dev and fedora-test, and several other 
technical mailing lists -- and the "Eloi" who maybe make it as far as 
actually getting Fedora installed and subcribe to fedora-list.
We need to bridge the gap between the two!
Here's the proposal. We do real usuability studies. But we do it the "open 
source" way.
Everyone is a volunteer.
We recruit the users (the "Eloi") and ask them to choose a project they are 
interested in, and we hook them up with those specialists.
We recruit some more-technically minded people (the "Morlocks") and have 
them develop some usuability plans. These people should not be testers or 
developers, but people who understand the software or have the ability to 
communicate productively with the authors of the software.
A third set of people will actually engage with the end-users in one-on-one 
sessions, following the plans that were developed. They don't have to be 
experts in that particular piece of software, they just have to be good at 
leading these sessons. The two have to communicate either by phone or by 
IRC, or some other instant communication method.
The usuability sessions will be made public, so that other unrelated 
projects can derive some benefit from them. We'll allow others who know 
more about this kind of thing to comment on the results, summarize it for 
the developers, identify the problems and suggest solutions. Then the 
developers and testers can use this to develop the software for the end 
users.
With enough data, we should be able to identify the biggest problems and 
work to solve them before FC3. Then, when FC3 comes out, we can do this all 
over again.
The only problems I see are getting people involved and working with each 
other. I worry that while we will be able to get participants, those will 
always be the *wrong* people we are trying to target. However, never 
underestimate the amount of data that one session can produce! So maybe we 
don't need that much to actually happen.
Thought, ideas? Should we form a Fedora usuability group to tackle this?
-- 
Jonathan Gardner
jgardner@jonathangardner.net