[Kde-women] KDE Desktop Usability Survey

[Anne-Marie Mahfouf]

On March 29, 2005 04:16 pm, Eva Brucherseifer wrote:
> Dear Annma,
>
> can you please inform me, why you think so?
> As far as I know, the kde-women list is mainly crowded by users of the KDE
> desktop. Thus the subscribers are the perfect target for a usability test
> as the HASE group perfoms.
> Usability is an essential topic for KDE and a fundamental part of usability
> engineering is the performance of (costly) usability surveys with real
> users. It gives important input to the give tips based on _real_ data. Of
> course they also want the input of women too, don't you think so?
> I am very glad that the KDE project finally manages to attract also
> contributors from the usability world.
>
> Greetings,
> eva

This group has spammed all the KDE mailing lists so first this is an 
aggressive tactic. That means I got at least 10 same mails from them.
Secondly, this survey is not about usability at all. It says it is but in 
reality it is not. The questions are badly formulated, the same survey is 
done for GNOME and Windows and the results are not guaranteed  to reach us 
(no timeframe is defined, I asked the HASE people). This will not bring any 
useful hint at all nor is it conducted scientifically with a representative 
panel of KDE users. 
I would not call those questions a 'survey' myself.

If a real survey is to be done by serious people, of course I would invite the 
most users to take it. This is not the case, please have a deeper look at 
it . Last time we had a survey proposal on this list, we found out that the 
results would not be free. I have no time to browse the archives but youcan 
have a look. What I would like is to free this list from that kind of mail.

Usability is very good but usability is NOT done with that kind of surveys. 
Usability is done first through the KDE Usability mailing list and website 
and also with OpenUsability.org which has a very good team.
Usability should try to define a HIG for KDE.
I am the first one very interested in usability and indeed I asked for 
usability reports for KHangMan (I can say that a usability expert wrote one 
of the best usability reports in KDE, see
http://edu.kde.org/khangman/usability.php)
and KLettres and I improved many aspects of my software after these reports. 
We are working for usability guidelines for KDE-Edu, mainly with 
OpenUsability.org.

Maybe this is why I am shocked to see this 'survey' in all mailing lists and 
even on the Dot, as if it is something important. It minimizes the real work 
of people doing real usability improvements. It mislead users who think they 
participate to making KDE better. So from my point of view, it's damaging.

Free software projects such as KDE are now the target of all sort of studies, 
that's fine but that's not PART of KDE. Those 2 people (acronyms as HASE are 
catchy but well, this is a 2 people team), while belonging to a US 
university, are maybe not usability experts at all. We don't know their area 
of expertise nor their previous work. From what I see, they sent a misleading 
mail with misleading information (they imply they will help KDE, they don't 
mention the surveys for GNOME and Windows, those surveys are not visible 
through their website if you don't know the links). The same person can 
indeed take the survey twice or more from the same machine. All that does not 
strike me as very professional and I would not acknowledge any fact obtained 
through such a process. Maybe a script could fill and send several forms.

Maybe some people from this list if they have 15 minutes to loose could take 
this survey and share their impressions.

My impressions are negative and I react because I care about usability. Real 
usability.

Anne-Marie