[Nepomuk] Re: Fwd: [kde-runtime/active-development/master] nepomuk: remove references to "nepomuk" and "strigi" in the UI that users are likely to see

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Thursday, July 28, 2011 18:50:06 Vishesh Handa wrote:
> > with that out of the way, someone needs to go through the backup GUI and> 
de-> jargon the strings.
> Since I am the maintainer of Nepomuk Backup, I'll do it.

thank you! :))

> > and please, can we all agree to work on this together? to make Plasma> 
Desktop> a Jargon Free(tm) zone? to ship 4.8 without user visible jargon?
> Of course.

great .. that brings a smile to my face. seriously! see -> :)

email smileys do. not. lie!

> >From a user perspective I understand the need for not wanting to see terms
> like Nepomuk and Strigi. But from a developer's perspective, I put my
> heartand soul into Nepomuk, and want the project to be known. I want the
> users to be like "ohh! This feature is so cool, and it is possible because
> of Nepomuk."

i totally get that. but first you have to get them to LOVE what you're doing. 
and part of that is making the experience smoooth.

many users won't ever care the way we want them to: they won't know its us 
doing it or what our software is called. this will be true even if we put the 
names and even our photos ;) in front them every day. they just don't care 
about those kinds of details, even though *we* do.

what they care about is that their computer runs well and doesn't confuse, 
startle or disapoint them. which is a very big, tall order which we all strive 
to fulfill.

but when we do manage that trick, well .. then they love us. even if they 
don't know who we are. and when you see someone who runs our software and they 
are happy and smiling about it, that is all the payment one can ever ask for 
in life.

unfortunately, when most of our users see "nepomuk" or "strigi" in the UI they 
don't get it and it frustrates them because their computer is suddenly 
"talking geek" to them and it's confusing and even a little "scary" for some 
of them. this is not guessing on my part: this is very real, very honest 
feedback i get from very real users we have.

so in the effort to make your work known, recognized and loved .. pushing the 
words "nepomuk" and "strigi" at the user is actually going to make it harder 
to accomplish that.

the way we get you (and all of us) recognition is to deliver interesting 
software (i think we're doing that already!), put it in a beautiful package 
(we're nearly there!) and then talk about it ...

> Plus, there is the whole issue of Nepomuk not primarily being a
> "DesktopSearch" solution. However, I do not know a nice user appealing way
> ofportraying that. Semantic Storage perhaps?

ask yourself: do our users care? or do they just want to have a basic 
understanding of what this thing is, even if we do that in a mostly-but-not-
perfectly-accurate-but-completely-understandable way?

"semantic storage" to most of our users sounds like "grabulah bagulagabah". 
"desktop" and "search" are two words they know, however, even from the real 
world of physical objects :)

> Example - Nepomuk Backup is meant to backup all your Nepomuk data, but
> itdoes not backup any of the "desktop search" data as that is
> easilyreproducible. How do I explain what Nepomuk Backup is? All of these

this is part of why i didn't touch that tool .. i figured i would do all the 
obvious fixes (again :) and then once we can all agree that this is what we 
actually want, then we could discuss this issue. so here we are .. let's 
discuss :)

i don't think it matters much that it does more than "desktop search". for 
most of our users, everything in there from email to hard disk contents to 
activity relationships is "desktop search". if there is a better term out 
there, let's try and find it, but i haven't come across one yet. that doesn't 
mean it does not exist, of course, and i'm as open as anyone to improvements 
there.

for the back up tool, its probably enough to refer to it as "Desktop Search" 
data backups.

> optionsare provided under "Desktop Search", but people wouldn't consider
> "tagging"and "rating" to be a part of Desktop Search,

don't be too sure about that. i'd also suggest that "technically accurate" in 
text the user is expected to see and read is often the enemy of 
"understandable and approachable".

> One option is to help people understand what Nepomuk provides, and use
> theappropriate term.

again, the vast majority of users i talk to about this just don't care. and we 
can't make them care. not consciously, anyways. those same people LOVE many of 
the features nepomuk provides ... but they can't bring themselves to learn 
enough about it to understand the technical details. as soon as we say, 
"Tagging and rating are stored in the same place as metadata for files as well 
as activity relationships .. in fact, they are all relationships store in a 
graph .." their eyes glaze over in boredom / confusion. :)

> But then many users just don't care, and want their system to just work.

exactly :) and when it does, they love us for it.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
humru othro a kohnu se
GPG Fingerprint: 8B8B 2209 0C6F 7C47 B1EA  EE75 D6B7 2EB1 A7F1 DB43

KDE core developer sponsored by Qt Development Frameworks
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