Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

Máirín Duffy duffy at fedoraproject.org
Wed Oct 21 14:58:37 UTC 2009


On 10/21/2009 10:44 AM, Seth Vidal wrote:
> Can you list the ways the live media install experience is bad? I'm not
> familiar with this list and I'm curious about it.

I'm new to this list too, so I hope it's okay I'm using it for
discussing install experience stuff. (Someone let me know if I should
take it elsewhere; on that note if we stay here we should let the
anaconda-devel list know about the discussion if they want to monitor it.)

I'm hoping with some help (and it looks like Rahul has volunteered
already; great! :) ) we can come up with a document listing out the
problems. It might take a couple weeks or so though.

One problem I remember Jon showing me involved where you'd click a
cancel button to quit the process, and get stuck in a weird and
frightening (since it potentially involves your hard disk getting
written to) loop of cancel dialogs.

I can't remember the other issues he showed me off-hand. I did see a lot
of basic surface-level usability issues (button alignment, button
labels, icon placement in the headers, badly-written explanatory text,
missing indication of progress so you had no idea how far you were and
how many steps were left to complete.)

>From experience I think many users have a lot of anxiety during the
installation process. (Did I really get everything I wanted to back up
backed up? Is this going to screw up my computer? Am I going to make a
mistake I can't go back and fix?) Especially coming from the windows
world where they are used to the OS being pre-installed - they don't
have the experience of installation to call back on. So while the
surface-level usability issues I cited might seem minor, polishing those
can make a big difference in making these anxious users feel more
comfortable.

~m




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