Talking to users (Re: "Big picture" design one release cycle ahead?)

[Björn Balazs]

Am Samstag, 27. Oktober 2012, 21:58:38 schrieb Thomas Pfeiffer:
> On Saturday 27 October 2012 18:37:56 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> > On Saturday, October 27, 2012 10:55:37 Björn Balazs wrote:
> > > We would probably need dot releases after each sprint (and hence have
> > > a shippable product after each sprint)
> > 
> > doing a proper release after each sprint will kill our productivity due to
> > the amount of developer manpower we have available to us. thankfully,
> > releases should not be necessary as people can simply update their tablet
> > in-situ using zypper. so we can simply refresh the build repos on OBS so
> > those who are participating with us can follow development.
> 
> Agreed. We won't need proper releases with all the fuzz. That's the big plus
> of having an always releasable master: When we work with users, we can just
> ask them to zypper up from master without risking the loss of data / cats /
> hamsters / grandmas.

Sounds good. Just one question following my reply below...

> > > and we would need to implement
> > > some way of talking to the users (best would probably be directly
> > > through the product).
> > 
> > do you have a concrete concept of what this might look like?
> 
> From my perspective, ideally we'd have a group of users interested in
> participation (but not necessarily programming) who we interview and do
> usability tests and surveys with etc.

I strongly belief in talking to the user directly through the product, e.g. 
asking to answer some questions, subscribe to a user mailing list,... - we can 
figure out what we like best. 

To my mind this is the only way to a least have a potential to talk to some 
sort of representative users. This excludes the desired target groups, which 
Inge was addressing. We will have to use other techniques to model the not-
yet-users, e.g. we could use personas for that. So we do not loose them.

But it does carry some advantages, like:

- real users can report easily about real experiences (like David T. obviously 
feeled he wanted to that in reply to this thread, I think a lot of users (esp. 
the tinkerers) will have the same wish)

- if such a mechanism is established we will get to know where we are in terms 
of the user base and our desired target group (Did the control industry hop on 
yet?)

- people feel self efficient, because they influence the product - hence they 
will have a much more positive attitude towards PA and might even do some 
marketing and such...

- if numbers are getting larger, we do not have to bother the same user all of 
the time again


Now my question: If we do so, we would need to talk to people using a certain 
configuration / version of the software to get the right feedback (and people 
will not be able to tell us the correct version number of their software). 
This is where I drew the idea of dot releases from. Would this also be 
possible when we use the Master branch?

Cheers,
Björn

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Dipl.-Psych. Björn Balazs
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