[Kde-pim] jargon is bad! :)

[Thomas McGuire]

Hi,

On Tuesday 16 March 2010 02:40:03 Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> ok, so the point of this email is to note the obvious: displaying jargon to
> the user is bad. the average computer user does not know what
> "compositing", "akonadi" or "nepomuk" are. they do understand what
> "desktop effects"[1], "personal information service"[2] or "search
> service" is.
> 
> in my testing of KDE 4 here with real, actual non-technical KDE users (so
> not people who use MS Windows or Mac usually and are randomly subjected to
> KDE for a testing session ;), something that keeps coming up is the jargon
> that gets "leaked" out into the UI.
> 
> this is not a small issue. it's the difference between "this is difficult,
> hard and sucks" and "i like this". seriously, even in failure people
> respond better when the messages they get are understandable and human.
> few things freak people out more than not understanding something they
> just read when it is something they feel they probably need to (like an
> error message).
> 
> i've fixed up nepomuk once or twice (but jargon continues to leak as new
> strings are added!), i've just looked through kwin's messages and fixed
> them up (after testing the results on a user here) and akonadi hasn't been
> touched yet (and is full of visible jargon).
> 
> please spend the few minutes necessary to improve this. it is really,
> really important. and please help prevent new strings with jargon from
> creeping in.

I absolutely agree. In KDEPIM, we have to be careful about this. For example, 
we should use the term "Folder" instead of "Collection" and "Mail", "Contact" 
etc instead of "Item".

Sometimes, using the term "Akonadi" can not entirely be avoided, and I'm 
unsure what to do about it. For example, when KMail can not work because 
Akonadi is not running, we have to tell the user in some way, like "The 
Akonadi PIM framework is not running, bla bla.".
Another example: The mail import tool (still wrongly called KMailCVT) can 
import mails into Akonadi, the mails can not just be used by KMail, but also 
by other applications. Currently the introduction page there says "This 
program will help you import your email [..] into Akonadi". Any suggestion how 
to improve that? I'm quite sure normal users don't know what "importing into 
Akonadi" means, but saying "importing into KMail" would be plain wrong now.

Regards,
Thomas
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