Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Seth Vidal]

On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Máirín Duffy wrote:

> 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.
>


okay so when you use the word "Terrible" you really mean "somewhat 
unpolished"?

B/c it doesn't sound to me like you're talking about massive changes to 
the interface or experience at all. I'm glad they can make a big 
difference but 'terrible' in my mind invokes a ground-up redo. What you've 
described doesn't  sound like that at all.


-sv