Survey to prepare 'Next Workspace Iteration' sprint

[Björn Balazs]

Marco, all,

Am Dienstag, 5. Juni 2012, 10:01:44 schrieb Marco Martin:
> On Monday 04 June 2012, Björn Balazs wrote:
> > Aaron, all,
> > 
> > thanks for your mail. It is good to adress these kinds of worries directly
> > - and before the survey gets started. I actually get confronted with them
> > often in my work.
> > 
> > I personally think we do not need to worry. In most projects I worked
> > with,
> > people tend to agree with me at latest at the end of the project ;)
> > 
> > Let me explain a bit - I hope you put the worries aside as well:
> > 
> > We are not asking people how to build the bridge in terms of e.g. static
> > calculations. These have to be done by an engineer. No discussion about
> > this.
> > 
> > What I try to do with this survey, is to ask users / the community to
> > report about their life - or to stay in the picture: let them imagine
> > where the bridge could be built and how the existence of the bridge would
> > change their life.
> 
> answers could tend to be more how they want their life or how they want to
> be seen as rather that the reality, it may be not completely useless tough

Yeah - all answers will be biased somehow. This is true simply by the research 
method we choose. 

We - as the designers and creators of KDE - will have to understand and 
believe what people say.  And we will use only what makes sense to us to 
create a vision, personas, etc - and at the end software.

> > people as possible into the development of (Free) Software Products. This
> > will lead to better products, more (loyal) users, more advertising and
> > more volunteers that participate, e.g. in bug triaging or translation.
> > People will identify with a product they feel they have influenced - they
> > will get a feeling of self efficacy. Of course this will not be the result
> > of a one-time survey, but gathering experiences with this kind of approach
> > might bring us into the situation of a cultural change in KDE, that is
> > less developer-centric and more focussed on the users.
> 
> completely agree that a cultural change like that is somewhat needed, and
> this survey is not useless in that regard, even tough probably of a
> somewhat limited help, we have to take that data as something informative,
> but something that has to be interpreted beyond what it seems to say (ie
> beyond what users think they need)
> 
> we should always remember that user led is never exactly a good approach
> http://uxmag.com/articles/user-led-does-not-equal-user-centered

Nobody ever suggested to do a user-led approach, to stick in the terminology 
of the article. Even though I have a somewhat more differentiated view on the 
topic than it is been layed out in the article, the main points are correct 
(ok, the article is short and hence has to simplify things).

There is a quote that is supposed to be said by Henry Ford: "If I had asked 
people what they want, they would have said faster horses." This is - sorry - 
the bullshit approach of letting people tell me what to do. This not how 
working with users works.

When I talk about user research here, I always have in mind to let people tell 
about their life, their fears, their experience - areas they are absolute 
experts in. This is why I tried to formulate the questions on the first page 
to be close to peoples actual experience. 

The second page is actually an experiment. As Aaron pointed to the existing 
vision, I tried to get feedback on what is beeing said there. My experience 
is: A good vision can be tested by end-users. I had a lot of problems (and 
still are not 100% satisfied) transforming our vision into something I think 
could perhaps be testable. In this matter I actually think the vision is not 
as good as it could be. One outcome of the sprint could perhaps be a better 
formulated vision. An end-user testable vision. It might in the end not state 
anything different than now, just be formulated in a way, people can 
understand better. 

In the end: User research has to start somewhere. When we finish the survey, 
we will know much better, what we should have asked. And we will simply use 
this knowledge to make an even better next survey. I am very happy you agree 
on the need for some changes in the culture. Let's start to experiment!

Thanks again for your feedback

Cheers,
Björn

> Cheers,
> Marco Martin
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