On Tue, 2008-07-29 at 21:39 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi folks,
Paul W. Frields wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-07-28 at 21:35 -0500, Gian Paolo Mureddu wrote:
>> Like Paul suggests, maybe it would be a good time to conduct a usability
>> study among Fedora users? I understand that Fedora advances through its
>> contributors, but it's supported by its users.
>
> Just to be very clear, I'm not suggesting that the Fedora Project has
> the resources to do such a study. They're very time consuming and can
> be costly. So the chances are *very* small of all those costs coming
> out of our (equally) small budget.
>
> What I suggested was that interested and experienced community members
> band together to design and implement these tests. There is much more
> to usability testing than simply making lists of what people would like
> to see. It's a highly organized science of its own. Those difficulties
> translate directly into high costs, which is why we don't conduct them
> centrally. So while I agree that now is "a good time" to do it, that
> doesn't solve the problem of *who* is going to do it, and *how*.
If it's any help at all, it is really really easy to conduct your own
usability tests. You need to have a target for the test first. We did
this recently at FUDcon for the Fedora website. I'll walk you through
exactly how we did this quickly so you can see how to do it yourself:
Well hush my mouth, this sounds great. But the key factor is the
"target" part -- and mostly the studies that I've seen users advocate is
a limitless problem set, without boundaries. So I mistakenly brought
that knee-jerk bias to this conversation, which is my own fault.
--
Paul W. Frields
gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717
http://paul.frields.org/ - -
http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/
irc.freenode.net: stickster @ #fedora-docs, #fedora-devel, #fredlug