Introducing LikeBack - Quick Feedback from Beta-Testers

[Ellen Reitmayr]

On Sunday 13 August 2006 19:08, Sébastien Laoût wrote:
> > They may become frustrated if they realise that after an update, the cool
> > feedback buttons are gone ;-)
>
> Frustrated? Really?
>
> If the buttons are gone, they can begin to use the application without
> worrying to think to report theire experience with it.

Well, we had a long discussion about all this on IRC...

Somebody said there are "small apps" and "bug apps" ;-) 

For bug apps, users often become angry when they don't work the way they 
expect them to work. Imagine your app crashed and you lost the work of the 
last 30 minutes -> having an option to yell and complain makes most people 
feel less angry (we want happy users!!) ;-) 

As a developer, you sure don't want to read such angry comments - but the 
input is valuable. As well, you do not want to go through each and every 
report, at least in the "big bug apps", because that would take too much of 
your important development time.

So the idea of an intermediate layer came up. A group of (new) contributors 
who go through such LikeBack reports for the big/bug apps, remove (or 
comprise) duplicates, transfer "real" bugs to the bug tracker etc. But how to 
get these people? Danimo suggested a call on the dot, but we weren't sure how 
to attract people to this (possibly rather boring) job. So I'm not sure if 
this is a feasible solution.

Also, they noted that not all distributions install the tools required for 
backtraces by default. without backtraces, many bug reports by non-technical 
users may become difficult to reproduce.

> Do we have statistics about how much bugs are entered through the "Report a
> Bug" window compared to those entered on the website directly?

that would be interesting, yes. 

> And having the enabling/disabling option in the Help menu could also lead
> to a better ratio of technical / non-techincal users:
> - Technical users could open the Help menu for the "About" dialog to find
> the version they have, to know if they should upgrade. There, they will
> discover the LikeBack enabling option.
> - Non-technical users will perhapse have difficulties to use the
> application and could open the Help menu to find the handbook.
>   Then, in this menu they will find the checkbox "Send Comments to the
>   Developers" to enable the LikeBack icons.

and you still can enable it by default in testing versions.

> PS: Yes, I propose an option to "enable/disable" LikeBack and not the three
> "like"/"dislike"/"bug" icons. This is because people should be able to
> click those options at any time, in any window, dialog, sub-dialog... They
> should not have to interupt theire workflow, close the dialogs in order to
> reach the Help menu and then use the LikeBack options.

I wasn't aware the buttons appear in every dialog until Tom showed me the 
admin interface. Good idea as the application context is given :)

Still, I think that the "official" Report Bug item and your tool should be 
integrated. Again: Why removing the feedback functionality completely just 
because the user doesn't like the buttons?

Instead of "enable/disable" I'd rather offer an option "Show/Hide feedback 
buttons in [Application Name]'s windows and dialogs". If called from the main 
app window, the user will have to give more detailed information (dialog 
title or reproduction).

cheers,
/el

-- 
Ellen Reitmayr
KDE Usability Project
usability.kde.org
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