"Dear Celeste" - A request from the Amarok project

[Mark Kretschmann]

Hi Celeste,

I know that you're probably insanely busy already with KDE usability
work and other things, but I would like to ask you whether you are
generally interested (if time permits) to help the Amarok project a
bit in usability matters. I have to admit that I'm a great fan of the
work you did for KDE so far, and I imagine that other Amarok teamsters
appreciate your work as well.

Basically, what I'm asking you is to provide advice for us with
usability questions. One of our aims with Amarok 2 has always been to
make the application more accessible to new users, while at the same
time offering the rich feature set that Amarok is known for. I like to
express it this way: Becoming 'Mom Compatible' (TM), while at the same
time offering 'True Power' (TM) for our dedicated users. It's of
course very hard to achieve both of this at the same time, but I feel
it's not impossible, if one is willing to work really hard on it,
which we are. In fact I would seriously love to see my mom being able
to use Amarok one day; it would make me proud. Also, we are basically
forced to improve on our usability, due to requirements from our
commercial partners - so it's no longer optional, but a must.

At any rate, we already have one usability expert, who has been with
our project for a very long time, and who has done excellent work for
us. His name is Dan Leinir Jensen (you might know him, I'm not sure).
I would love to see the two of you cooperate on usability questions
(well if you are willing to help us). My thinking is that more eyes
can only be of an advantage here.

One thing I'd still like to emphasize before coming to an end with
this mail: What we are not so much interested in is a classical
"usability review", like you have often done for other KDE
applications. E.g. let's assume that you would dislike the complete
Amarok 2 GUI for one reason or another, and would urge us to rewrite
it completely, then we couldn't (for technical and time reasons) and
wouldn't (we are fairly comfortable with our general trend) do that.
Rather, I would ask you to give us hints on specific components, and
maybe explain how we could improve the application iteratively, step
by step, so to speak. I think that one can often reach a goal with
smaller steps as well, and it's both less radical and less painful for
the users and the developers.

Anyway, enough with my rambling now :) Please consider our request,
and even if you can't contribute a lot because of time restrictions,
we would appreciate the input you could give us very much!


PS: I'm CC'ing our amarok-devel mailing list, as I think the other
teamsters might be interested in this discussion too.


Thanks, Mark.

-- 
Mark Kretschmann
Amarok Developer
www.kde.org - amarok.kde.org