On Wed, 2004-05-12 at 17:57 -0400, Will Cohen wrote:
Lots of very encouraging stuff. Thanks Will. :-)
METRICS
Unfortunately, many people's metrics for desktop applications were
literally eyeballed, click a menu item see how long it takes for the
result to occur. This is difficult to automate and script. We really
A small comment: the only really meaningful metric from the user's point
of view is "does it take too long?". This is a binary variable. It is
of course totally subjective, but _that is the point_ --- "objective"
considerations are not meaningful to users.
What I am trying to say is that (I humbly suggest) you face two
problems: first finding the most pressing problems; and then fixing
them. Objective metrics help with the second, but not the first.
Examples:
1) Clicking on the Nautilus desktop menu to open a terminal results in a
noticeable delay before the window has appeared on the screen. For such
a simple application it should be instantaneous (my rig is a 2,.4GHz
Athlon with 767MB RAM).
2) Opening a PDF file with gv results in an instantaneous appearance of
the window; using ggv takes about five seconds.
3) A noticeable delay starting gedit (same reasoning as per terminal).
I know that these "simple" apps hide hidden complexity due to their
gnomeyness, but again, that is irrelevant to users.
I hope the above is useful. Please don't read it as bitching. I _love_
Fedora and GNOME, and I want to express my gratitude to those of you who
have provided me with such an enjoyable computing environment.
cheers,
John
--
ICQ: 261810463
AIM: johnfrombluff
AOL: johnfrombluff
MSN: johnwilliamsFromBluff(a)hotmail.com
Yahoo: JohnFromBluff
Jabber: jwilliamsFromBluff(a)jabber.org