FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

[Ralf Corsepius]

William Jon McCann wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 12:56 PM, Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote:

>> As it is, the people in the trenches doing QA and user support have way
>> more convincing data than the desktop team.
>>
>> Designing HCI without Humans in the loop is bogus beyond belief.
> 
> I think you are conflating user experience design with usability.  Our
> user experience design and interface design takes place very early in
> the Fedora development cycle.  It is primarily informed by our
> experiences, research, and vision.  Currently, the user testing is
> done primarily after a Fedora release.
IMNSHO, this is a serious defect of the development process.
Your remark also explains a lot of the (IMNSHO) silly decisions and 
regressions Fedora desktop users are being confronted with.
Simply deviate a "mu" from the desktop team developers' 
use-cases/hw/setup and you are likely to get stuck somewhere.

> It would be great if we organized something similar.
You already have an essential component of it: It's called user 
feedback. It's up to those in charge to take it into account or to 
ignoring it. I regret having to say so, but I feel the latter is what is 
happening to a wide extend.

> A word of
> caution though - this is hard to do correctly.
Right, but it's pretty easy to identify errors and regressions.
The problem is developers to draw consequences from them.

> It is quite easy to
> collect misleading and confusing data.  The exact process of the
> testing matters a great deal.  FWIW, I'm hoping to do something like
> this in the next few months.
Glad to hear this. To me, it's very apparent that much of recent years' 
RH/GNOME desktop works have hardly seen much usability testing before 
pushing them into Fedora.

Ralf