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List: kde-usability
Subject: RE: URGENT: Questions for next monday for Njaard
From: "Jennifer E Jobst" <jobst () us ! ibm ! com>
Date: 2001-08-21 18:16:25
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You're all probably sick of hearing me say this, but what are the goals of
this questionnaire for LWE? What *exactly* do we want to know about the
people we're asking to fill this thing out, and more importantly, *how do
we plan to use this information*? Just asking people questions about their
name, age, gender, what they use KDE for and what apps are their favorite,
etc is great, this provides us with a general demographic of the KDE user
base, but then what? How are we planning to use this information to
improve KDE?
I'm sorry, I don't mean to put a damper on things. I'm really excited
about having a "captive" audience to fill out our questionnaire. But when
the time comes to compile all this information, I'm really concerned that
we don't know what we're going to get out of it, or how we're going to use
that information. However, we really need to figure this out *before* we
develop the questionnaire.
So, having said all that, I decided to take a walk and ponder life, the
universe, and Everything. Please note that the following are only my
thoughts and opinions, and are in no way the Gospel Truth (or any other
kind of truth for that matter).
* At LWE, we're not guaranteed that *only* KDE users are going to answer
our questionnaire. I mean, what if we have a Gnome user or two who tried
KDE and decided they didn't like it? From a usability standpoint, I wanna
know *why* they didn't like it. So I want them to answer our questionnaire
as well. Plus, maybe all the folks who use Gnome are newbies, whereas all
the sysadmins use KDE. Who knows? Gnome users are valuable too!
* The people who agree to answer our questionnaire may not be sitting in
front of a computer (I dunno if we're gonna have paper copies or not, but
it might be handy to have them). Even if they are, it won't be configured
like their home machine. So they're going to be answering all these
questions from memory. Which means that we can't ask them anything too in
depth, 'cause they won't remember.
* The people who answer our questionnaire may not have much time on their
hands. Thus, a short multiple-choice questionnaire is more likely to be
answered than one with a lot of blank spaces for them to write in their
thoughts, opinions, and feelings.
OK. So, having taken a walk and figured this out, I also tried to figure
out exactly what we want to get out of this study, and how we can use it.
I agree with Matt's statement that we can use this study to figure out
where (in a general sense) to concentrate our usability research efforts.
We can also get a better feeling for who constitutes the user base, where
and why they use Linux, KDE or Gnome, and what kind of user they consider
themselves to be. This information helps us form a clearer picture of who
KDE is catering to (and more importantly, who it is *not* catering to, and
therefore who we can make it better cater to), so that in later tests we'll
know which groups to focus on.
Thus, the goals of this study (as I see them) are as follows:
* form a clearer picture of the KDE user base, as well as those who do not
use KDE (this will be a reference for future testing)
* determine which applications are most commonly used, and why (this will
let us know where we need to focus our test efforts)
* get a list of people who we can contact in the future for more usability
testing questions
Sooooo... I've tried to make up a short questionnaire based on this. It
is by no means finished, and actually the email that Matt just sent out has
a lot of other great questions. Take it, leave it, fix it, whatever.
A word about what I think we can reasonably expect to get out of users. A
usability test or study is so much more than a questionnaire. It's about
watching people do a specific task, or asking them to complete a specific
task and then asking them questions about it. It is much more specific
than anything we will be able to do at LWE. Thus, I don't think we're going
to end up getting a whole ton of stuff that is immediately directly
applicable to usability. What we *will* get is a better picture of who we
are dealing with and what their general usage habits are. We'll be able to
look for trends like "all Red Hat users use Gnome" or "most sys admins
don't use a graphical desktop". Some of this leads directly to usability
issues (*why* don't sys admins like graphical desktops, and what can we do
to KDE to improve its appeal to this group), other issues are not always
usability related (Red Hat users use Gnome b/c it's the default. Ok, so
then how do we make KDE more well-known? Not an issue for us to deal
with... that's the marketing department).
Sorry guys, this was waaaay more long-winded than I had intended. Oh well,
I hope that at least some of this info is useful!
-j
(See attached file: Questionnaire.rtf)
Jennifer E. Jobst
Linux Information Development
IBM Linux Technology Services
(512) 838-8298, T/L 678-8298
\
"Jonathan Bacon" \
<j.bacon@delta.wlv.ac. To: <kde-usability@mail.kde.org> \
uk> cc: \
Sent by: Subject: RE: URGENT: Questions \
for next monday for Njaard
kde-usability-admin@ma \
il.kde.org \
\
\
08/21/2001 10:37 AM \
Please respond to \
kde-usability \
\
\
I think the main thing is for us to identify areas that need results. I
see that we need the following:
Profile: Name, Date Of Birth, Location
Experience: Internet, Computers, Linux
Uses: At Work, At Home, For Pleasure
Usability Issues: Which App, The Problem, Proposed Solution
There are obviously other things we need to know...but we need to get
this knocked up fairly quickly.
Jono
-----Original Message-----
From: mattc [mailto:matt@flowine.com]
Sent: 21 August 2001 16:20
To: kde-usability@mail.kde.org
Subject: Re: URGENT: Questions for next monday for Njaard
O.K., the LWE study is a great opportunity for us to get our feet wet.
Let's
get to work on it. I suggest we just start a discussion about it on
this
list, and eventually (rather quickly actually) come up with a list of
questions.
Here goes.
First, lets get some focus on what we want the questions to be about.
Here
are some possibilities -
Usability issues - of course
specific programs?
a general "How do you like it?"?
What apps does the user use? KDE and others?
I really like this last one. With so many browsers and mail options out
there, it would be interesting to know what people are using instead of
the
default KDE aps, and why. For instance, someone may prefer Mozilla over
Konqueror (oh, the blasphemy!) because it is easier to get plugins
working
(and it is IMO)
I don't think that we will be able to guide the user through a series of
tasks, so that will limit how specific we can get.
What are your thoughts?
Matt
On Tuesday 21 August 2001 02:06 am, Jonathan Bacon wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> Njaard on #kde (charles samuals) has written a little program to
gather
> test information from people at LWE.
>
> What we now need to do is to get this into action. I know Matt and
> Jennifer were interested in writing some tests, but this needs to be
> done for Monday.
>
> I am on the edge of getting the DB driven site finished now, so I
don't
> have a lot of time to work on this, so could you guys work on it. :-)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Jono
>
> _______________________________________________
> kde-usability mailing list
> kde-usability@mail.kde.org
> http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability
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["Questionnaire.rtf" (application/rtf)]
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