[Panel-devel] KDE4 front-end papers

[Thiago Macieira]

Zbigniew Braniecki wrote:
>> To use an analogy it's like having a sick person go for a surgery -
>> as a doctor do you give them a scalpel and say "how would you fix
>> you?" or do
>> you ask them where it hurts, figure out what's wrong and perform the
>> surgery
>> yourself?
>
>And should the doctor say "I'm going to do X,Y and Z to improve your
>situation" so you can say "but doctor, it doesn't hurt me in Y, so
> you'll not solve my problem there, but in your plan it seems that
> you're not going to solve my problem with W" or should he just do his
> work, wake you up and say "I did X,Y,Z. If you don't like my changes,
> change your body"? ;)

And the doctor will say, "who's got the surgery diploma here?"

You should know better than to argue with your doctor. He knows best 
what's good for you. That's also why they say doctors are the worst 
patients...

It's the same thing as when a layman comes to a physicist and starts 
telling him why his idea of how the Universe works is correct: who 
studied N years to understand that?

I'm not saying we shouldn't listen to the users. In all the three cases 
above (and Aaron's bridge example), it makes perfect sense to hear 
opinions, to make a survey, etc. But that's just a hint for the 
developer, surgeon, scientist, planner: he's going to do the brunt of the 
work and decide whether to accept the idea or not. The user will just 
have to live with it.

>>Yeah... Because it's not there yet. Once the betas will start coming,
>> that's
>> where we'll be accepting feedback. Until then there's absolutely no
>> decent feedback we could get.
>
>It'll be too late for tons of feedback.

And now it's too early.

Besides, if we NEED tons of feedback at the time of the betas, we're doing 
something seriously wrong.

>>Exactly, that's when a user all you do is download a beta. Then you
>> provide
>> feedback. And that feedback will be _immensely_ appreciated for KDE 4.
>> The purpose of a long beta cycle before this release will be exactly
>> that, to redefine a lot of things so they work _for the people_.
>
>Hmm, so, can you say that I'm wrong that it'll be too late for majorty
> of feedback?

No. We're saying that it won't be too late. We're saying that we have a 
long beta cycle in order to be able to accommodate all of the feedback.

>My experience is that "beta" is the moment when you can improve the
> feature set, not change it. When you can improve set of major concerns,
> not redesign goals.

Welcome to Open Source: he who does the work decides.

>Once more - I would never try to doubt in your experience and knowledge.
> I'm just assuming that it's theoreticly possible that your routines
> could bound you to already known paths and result in missing some
> things that cannot be archived in your model. I also believe that it's
> always good to share the experience and discuss different approaches
> between different projects.

That's why we blog. That's why we have mailing lists. That's why we post 
screenshots, create alphas and betas, etc.

But what you're asking is that we stop working, dump all of the ideas that 
we've had and restart from the scratch, talking to a hypothetical mass of 
users who can provide intelligent feedback.

I'm sorry, but this is not doable. First, we cannot stop working. Whatever 
is to be done, has to be done with work in progress. Second, there's no 
way we can dump all of our preconceptions. And third, you're assuming 
there is a mass of users who can provide intelligent, structured 
feedback.

I'm not saying users are stupid.

I'm saying that unfiltered data coming from the users have very little 
practical use to developers. This kind of data has to be filtered by 
someone else, condensed and formatted into concrete proposals. And, so 
far, we don't have those people. What we have are the usability people 
and their job is not to do that.

Maybe you've found an area where you can contribute?

-- 
Thiago Macieira  -  thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  thiago.macieira (AT) trolltech.com     Trolltech AS
    GPG: 0x6EF45358                   |  Sandakerveien 116,
    E067 918B B660 DBD1 105C          |  NO-0402
    966C 33F5 F005 6EF4 5358          |  Oslo, Norway
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