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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: KJolts
From:       "Aaron J. Seigo" <aseigo () olympusproject ! org>
Date:       2002-01-26 7:20:02
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hi...

> IMHO, usability problems should be reported to bugs.kde.org.

some usability issues are indeed bugs, but some are most deffinitely not 
bugs. at least not in the sense that i think of bugs as a developer.
having a "Usability" categorization on bugs.kde.org as there is for Grave, 
Crashes, Normal, Wishlist, etc would help bridge this problem, though this 
ignores the fact that there are different severities of usability issues.

but even then there are still usability issues that IMO would be a waste of 
the bug system's resources: e.g. key accels missing in dialogs. this is a 
huge pet peeve of mine but i'd rather not have the bugs system filled to the 
gills with "No key accell on label Foo in dialog Bar in application 
KSomething".

having a usability report is a much more efficient way to address usability 
issues than having a bunch of bugs in kde.bugs.org.

that said, bugs that are actually uncovered during a usability study (such as 
crashes) ought to be reported via the bug system and perhaps left out of the 
usability report altogether. Jennifer's document on rating usability bugs 
recognizes this as well and calls these items "Defects".

> The usability maintainer for each app then could collate all the reports
> and produce a report for the app maintainer.

this is assuming that the app maintainer cares about usability or will act on 
the reports. i think it would be much more effective if the usability project 
had its own group of hackers that simply went around adressing usability 
report issues. these usability hackers would use usability reports as their 
roadmap and work with app maintainers (where/when available) to getting the 
fixes applied...

personally, i am very much in favour of the usability project having its own 
repository of usability bugs and think that having standalone reports 
written in HTML is not as effective as it could/should be.

my question to the group is, which would be a more desired system:

 a) use bugs.kde.org
 b) have a web based reporting system at usability.kde.org specifically for 
creating/tracking usability issues
 c) a KDE app to help write usability reports that saves reports as XML 
and/or HTML
 c) stick with writing standalone HTML files by hand

-- 
Aaron Seigo
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