On 01/07/12 11:50, Vic wrote:
>
>> A convincing argument for GNOME 2 you have there.
>
> It was your argument in support of Unity. I was trying to point out how
> fatuous it is.
>
It wasn't meant in support of Unity, just that the fact that something
is de-facto standard doesn't make it right. That applies to many
things.. Word documents, qwerty keyboards, desktops. It was a counter to
the foot-stamping "I want this and I don't want that new thing because
it isn't this old thing" that I see a lot.
>> We do regular user testing with people (pretty much) off the street and
>> that helps to feed back to our design and development processes.
>
> Well, your test subjects seem to be producing results entirely at odds
> with mine. Are you giving them a side-by-side Gnome2/Unity comparison, or
> are you giving them two versions of Unity and asking for their preference?
> The latter would give skewed responses...
>
I'm not privy to the exact circumstances under which the most recent
tests are performed. However in the past I believe they have been given
one machine running Unity and a list of tasks to perform. Here's a
summary of what was done last year.
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2011-April/032988.html
> Here's my suggestion: reinstate the Gnome2-like desktop. Do you honestly
> think that will get treated seriously if I were to suggest it on IRC?
That specific point is tricky given upstream GNOME project have
abandoned GNONME 2. However we do ship gnome-fallback mode which does
behave like GNOME 2. It's in the repo, just not default on the CD. If
you asked for a GNOME2-like desktop you'd probably get the answer:-
sudo apt-get install gnome-session-fallback
>> We do listen
>
> [citation needed]
>
https://lists.launchpad.net/unity-design/msg07682.html
"Many of the changes made stem from that research and testing. Not all
of them. But even the crazier bits can be tested in isolation to gain
confidence or shape insights."
https://lists.launchpad.net/unity-design/msg07665.html
"In fact, the dodge-windows approach tested very poorly. We thought it
would work well, tried it, tested it, and have had to evolve from there
based on evidence. "
"So, based on that, we made the following design choices:
...
Not to offer a dodge option, because users who don't want it always
there are perfectly capable of using it in plain hiding mode, and
users who don't know what 'dodge' means don't have to spend time
trying to parse it."
We also look _daily_ at high profile (many affected users, hi-impact
issues) bug reports and assign developers to work on them. There's a lot
of them though.
http://tinyurl.com/76npbtp
We also have a system which sends crash reports to us and automatically
generates bug reports. We cherry pick bugs from that list which are high
impact. Okay these aren't design issues but it's another illustration of
us listening to what problems users are having.
https://errors.ubuntu.com/
We also get verbal feedback from people. I was recently in a bar and was
approcahed by two friendly Ubuntu Unity users who asked me why a
particular feature was broken and when I looked into it found it was a
higher profile issue than I'd previously thought. I assigned a developer
to that last week and expect that issue to get fixed and released real
soon now.
So yeah, we do listen.
Unless all someone has to say is "it sucks" in which case Linux Mint /
Debian / Fedora etc are -> that way.
Cheers,
--
Alan Pope
Engineering Manager
Canonical - Product Strategy
+44 (0) 7973 620 164
alan.pope@???
http://ubuntu.com/
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