Hi Maarten, hi all,
Maarten Brouwers wrote:
Hi Leonard,
> I stumbled recently upon an interesting article:
> [http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/us-analysis.html]
I gave it a quick read, but was kind of disappointed with the approach
suggested, maybe it is good for business managers/marketeers, but it
seems to be too much of a quantitative approach to something that is
hardly quantifiable, if you ask me. I don't know what the idea is about
knowing that our competitors have a 3.4 as a mean navigation score. Does
this mean we should do better on this? Of course you can see where we
fall short, but in many cases this is probably obvious...
Are you sure, you know where OOo falls short?
I am not that sure that *I* myself know it. I may have some thoughts,
but *these* are still only my thoughts, NOT very hard evidence. I am a
guy who worked extensively in the *Evidence Based* field, and believe
me, there are various grades of evidence. Currently, OOo fares worst
that the lowest evidence level. (Yes, this is possible, too.)
Even though that article does address some specific fields (not all
relevant to OOo), there are some *more general* issues that become
evident. It is primarily these that need to be recognized!
(you are giving some examples already in your e-mail below).
Since no manager is asking us for numbers, it is hard to make
me enthusiastic about doing the analysis as suggested.
What was the most important point in the article?
*Who's the competition?*
================
Yes, those who did recognize this, are already half way done. When I
applied to the UX-team, there was NO wiki describing a *Competitve
Product Analysis*. Now, there is such a page for the UX-project:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/ToDo/Competitor_Software
[There is still a lot to do on the page. And we still have to do the
correct analysis, but at least there is one starting point.]
Where is the corresponding page for the OOo website?
There is a timid try on:
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Pages_Requirements
But this is not enough. Too few sites, ... (see later)
However, it did inspire me. Maybe it is a good thing to have a look at
how some, or all, of our potential users are performing with our
competitors websites. Try to be one of them when you browse the
Microsoft Office website, the Apple Works site, the Corel Office site...
and then see what they are doing better/worse than you are.
*What was the second most important point of the article?*
What to analyze!
===========
When comparing websites, what do we want to compare? What do we want to
do better? Where do we fare bad?
Answering these questions, one has done !!! 90% !!! of the job.
Implementing something is not the issue. What to implement is the issue.
Without knowing what sites to look at, you don't know what to improve.
And without knowing what to improve, there won't be any real improvement.
All decisions will be based on the feelings of a single user (or of
those who reply to the mailing list), and they would not capture the
true requirements.
Even IF you had a group of experts, and drew conclusions by consensus,
that would make it only to a level 3 evidence, still far away from a
level 1A evidence in evidence based research.
Please take my rant as a friendly advice. I have some experience with
studies, and the only consistent way to improve something is through
meticulous study and application of hard proven methods.
Sincerely,
Leonard
I am short on time, but we could open a wiki page for writing such
document collaboratively (maybe including a basic competitive analysis
as outlined in the article you mentioned).
> Especially dissatisfying remains the Extensions web-page. There were
> some comments (both from me and other people) for that page, but little
> happened, and most importantly, there are other things that look broken.
Actually, I am not sure whether the extension website efforts are
concentrated around this [EMAIL PROTECTED] group... I believe they should. A
more centralist approach is definitely wanted for OOo.
> The main OOo page needs also a major revamp.
> [I have added some comments on the wiki:
> see http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Pages_Requirements
> Indeed, http://first4quality.co.uk/OpenOffice/ looks much better.]
Thanks for adding to the user page requirements, I hope more people will
add what they think... designing when ideas are laid out is definitely
better than designing with plans constantly changing ;)
(...)
skipped some of the valid points made about the extension page
(...)
> I propose therefore the following time plan: (from - to)
I still have to see whether this work, but if you want to lead this a bit...
g.,
Maarten
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