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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Developers do listen to usability problems
From:       Emerald Arcana <emerald-arcana () rogers ! com>
Date:       2002-02-28 5:13:35
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Back in the days of pre-KDE2 almost one and a half years ago, there was an 
entity named "linuxqa@corel.com" that reported hoardes of usability bugs (in 
addition to other bugs).  Now, despite there not being any sort of real 
"usability bug", they logged everything as Minor bugs, unless it made an 
application impossible to use, in that case it was logged as Major.  How did 
they manage to get people to listen to them?  If I recall a number of the 
reported usability bugs DID in fact get fixed.

My point is that developers do listen to the bugs if they're well-founded, 
although there can be heated discussion about what constitutes a usability 
problem, which is why a list like this exists.

Now, if we have the resources, we could probably assign an "official bug 
report body" of sorts, run by the report maintainers here.  Perhaps the 
E-mail address would be 'usability-bugs@kde.org', and the account would be 
(somehow) shared, or the messages redirected to the mailing list, or 
something.  The list could have restricted access, limiting the "usability 
experts of KDE" to posting using this address.

The reason for this extra layer of bureaucracy is that if we keep the account 
limited-access to a trusted group, it would serve as the "certified usability 
problem" badge, in a way.... that anything sent from this account was 
discussed by the usability group and deemed, for sure, to be a problem, and 
would pass along appropriate solution suggestions as well.

Obviously, anyone would be welcome to log a usability bug, but anything that's 
logged by the "certified account" should be taken more seriously.  It may 
also be an indication to the developer that, "Yes, we've discussed this 
problem already and we believe that it is in fact an issue."  

Of course, there are drawbacks to this approach.. namely the extra level of 
bureaucracy that people generally hate, the extra administrtive hassle, and 
the possible tendency that a programmer may ignore everything that's not sent 
from "official usability account".

It's an idea, though.

-- 
-- Arcana
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