Hi all, just a short additional note - a more detailed answer will follow in the next days:
Please do not mix up user testing user research. RESEARCH is about understanding (and creating artifacts accordingly) who the users are, what they (want to) use the product for, what goals they want to reach, what criteria apply to a successfull interaction, what prior experience they have, where they will use the tool,.... This can perfectly be done in distributed teams using web tools. We can reach users all over the world. Past experience in Libre Office has shown that it is easy to get feedback from more than 10000 actual users within days. And these were just first tries... TESTING is about presenting users with possible solutions, and watching how they solve given tasks. This usually is extremely difficult to do with voluntary development teams, as you would need test rooms, local, but still representative - perhaps even paid - participants etc. There might be some room for this on fairs or similar events, but I would rather not be too enthusiastic about testing. In my experience the value of testing is over estimated. Most user tests actually do post-hoc research. And the other way around, I found that tests following projects that did decent research did not reveal any significant new insights. Summing it up: Lets do extensive user research - both because in Free Software we simply will never be in the situation to do extensive testing and because it is the more sustainable anyhow. As a sidenote: icons are something that can actually be user tested easily via the web, here research rather does not help that much in contrast. These different ways that are appropriate to reach our goals are part of the experience I would like to share with this group. This also is one of the reasons I do not think we need a standard workflow the way it is defined at the moment, but standard artefacts (see above), that need to be used in smart ways to reach the different goals we have. Cheers, Björn -- www.OpenUsability.org www.OpenSource-Usability-Labs.com -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/design/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
