On Thu, Jul 24, 2003 at 04:31:39PM -0400, Paul Iadonisi wrote:
Havoc Pennington has made exactly this point at least a few times in various forums when people argue about user interfaces. What many people on these mailing lists forget is that the user base of a distribution is typically two or three orders of magnitude larger than the mailing list participation. The kind of people participating in the mailing lists are typically not representative of the entire user base (rhl-list may be an exception, I don't know).
Another kind of bias is that people only complain about what they don't like, very few people ever praise what they do like.
That is if you have 100 people who like it how it is and 10 people who don't, you'll get 10 complaints and 1 praise, which looks like a 10-1 vote for changing it.
You find out the reality when you change it and suddenly get 100 complaints and 0 praise. ;-)
Anyway, this is why you really have to understand the goals and rationale for why the software is how it is, otherwise you sort of just keep changing it back and forth in response to complaints.
I like choice too, which is why I typically replace metacity with sawfish on my systems (sorry, Havoc, I know I keep jabbing you with that. hehe ;-)),
I don't mind one bit, though. ;-) I understand there are tradeoffs and everyone will use what they like, and that's all good.
Havoc
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Havoc Pennington wrote:
Another kind of bias is that people only complain about what they don't like, very few people ever praise what they do like.
That is if you have 100 people who like it how it is and 10 people who don't, you'll get 10 complaints and 1 praise, which looks like a 10-1 vote for changing it.
You find out the reality when you change it and suddenly get 100 complaints and 0 praise. ;-)
Anyway, this is why you really have to understand the goals and rationale for why the software is how it is, otherwise you sort of just keep changing it back and forth in response to complaints.
I was actually thinking about this last night when I ran across a "praise bug" in bugzilla. The problem is that there's no real place for praise ;-). There's bugzilla for logging all the "this sucks" stuff, but there's no similar constant surveying / tracking of what people like.... Maybe it would be a good idea to catalog periodically?
later, chris
On Fri, 2003-07-25 at 00:09, Chris Ricker wrote:
On Thu, 24 Jul 2003, Havoc Pennington wrote:
Another kind of bias is that people only complain about what they don't like, very few people ever praise what they do like.
That is if you have 100 people who like it how it is and 10 people who don't, you'll get 10 complaints and 1 praise, which looks like a 10-1 vote for changing it.
You find out the reality when you change it and suddenly get 100 complaints and 0 praise. ;-)
Anyway, this is why you really have to understand the goals and rationale for why the software is how it is, otherwise you sort of just keep changing it back and forth in response to complaints.
I was actually thinking about this last night when I ran across a "praise bug" in bugzilla. The problem is that there's no real place for praise ;-). There's bugzilla for logging all the "this sucks" stuff, but there's no similar constant surveying / tracking of what people like.... Maybe it would be a good idea to catalog periodically?
Well, I guess the problem is that users don't _know_ what they like until they lose it, mostly because lots of features are just hidden (for good reasons).
later, chris
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