On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 3:17 PM, Allan Day <allanp...@gmail.com> wrote: > Felipe Contreras <felipe.contre...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:14 PM, Allan Day <allanp...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> Felipe Contreras <felipe.contre...@gmail.com> wrote: >>>> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 1:20 AM, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) >>>> <zeesha...@gnome.org> wrote: >>>>> On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 12:45 AM, Felipe Contreras >>>>> <felipe.contre...@gmail.com> wrote: > ... >>> Different people will understand the words GNOME/happy/very >>> happy/ecstatic in different ways. Some might think 'GNOME' is their >>> distro (including the lower levels of the stack), >> >> Which is why we ask more question to understand their level of >> "geekness". That should help the make correlations; the people that >> use a terminal all the time more likely know that GNOME is just the >> DE. The people that don't have much experience might be confusing >> GNOME with the distribution. > > 'Geekness' is not the only thing that will affect people's > understandings, and you haven't adequately measured that anyway. Plus > that doesn't do anything to deal with the problem of what people > understand by 'GNOME'.
It's easy to throw empty criticism. Provide *suggestions*. >>> Likewise, >>> 'happy' will be thought of differently by different people (a very odd >>> word to include in a questionnaire, if you don't mind me saying): >> >> I think everyone understands the word happy. > > /ME wipes a mouthful of coffee from my monitor > > Then you haven't read enough of the survey research literature. That doesn't change the fact that everyone understands the word "happy". > ... >> In any case, if you have suggestions that don't have these problems, >> feel free to share them. > > My suggestion would be to give up entirely or to rethink the premise > of your research. The latter is what I'd have advised when I was > working as a research consultant, or what I would have told one of my > students when I used to teach this stuff, for that matter. That's not helpful. If you are such a master, surely you can come up with a totally brand new user survey that is order of magnitude better. That would be greatly appreciated. >>> You've also got the representativeness problem. Your sample will >>> inevitably be unrepresentative, probably highly so. Even if 100% of >>> your *unrepresentative sample* tick the unhappy box, that doesn't tell >>> you much about your target population: you might just have sampled >>> every 'unhappy' GNOME user that's out there. >> >> If you can identify the bias, that's not a huge problem. > > So tell me - how will you accurately compensate for the effects of > self-selection bias? What kinds of claims will you make about > representativeness? What would *you* do? >>> tl;dr version: your survey results will be misleading. >> >> No, the results would not be misleading; the *analysis* of the results >> might. But different people can analyze them in different ways. The >> important thing is to get *some* results. > > It seems bizarre to suggest that research data is valid irrespective > of how it is gathered. If your questionnaire does not provide valid > measurements no amount of analysis can compensate. You can thrown an analysis saying all this data is crap if that makes you happier, but this survey won't eat babies. >>> We already have a wealth of data about peoples' experiences with GNOME >>> 3 and are working to address the issues that are being raised. It's >>> great that you want to help, but this survey really won't be useful. >> >> Where? I haven't seen any. > > We've had incredible amounts of feedback; most (if not all) of which > has been read, and which does get taken seriously. I also know that > those of us who are influencing the design of GNOME 3 take a strong > interest in peoples' experiences with it and ask them questions > (that's certainly what I do). There's also a small series of user > tests last I did Christmas, the results of which have been fed into > the development process. Believe me, that is more than enough to be > going on for now. (Some more user testing would be useful at some > point in the future, though.) For a "professor" you should know better. I want the data. Anyway, I am going to ignore your comments, unless you provide some *suggestions* for improvement. -- Felipe Contreras _______________________________________________ desktop-devel-list mailing list desktop-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop-devel-list
