Exactly! I remember back in the day when I read Jakob Nielsen's books on
usability for websites, when I learned two main things:
1.) Designers/developers/CEOs find it difficult to turn the focus from what
they want, to what users want.
2.) To truly understand usability requires research. We all like to think
that what is usable should be obvious to us--after all, we are users too. It
is not obvious, because we have an agenda. We are trying to figure out what
the general public likes using only our self-selected group of Trisquel
users.
Granted, we weren't always Trisquel or GNU/Linux users, but we are now and
that is the point; We were willing to invest some time in a learning curve.
That may or may not be an acceptable curve for the general public. We don't
know how many people tried to take up Trisquel or GNU/Linux and gave up
because it was too much effort for them. We may be satisfied if we reduce the
curve below what we had to learn. But since we don't know how much more of a
learning curve we would accept compared to the general public, we don't know
how and how much to reduce it.
We need to know what they think is usable, not what we think is usable.
Until then, these discussions degrade down (hopefully) to whatever most of us
think is usable and then choose that. As long as we can try and imagine how
things were when we started, that might not be a terrible second
approximation (maybe).
So I see three main approaches:
1) What we like better for ourselves now.
2) What we imagine we would have liked better then.
3) Market research
As far as how to do the research, I don't know. Some sort of show or expo
would be one opportunity. There may be sources of research that already
exist that can assist us in this. If someone here has experience in this
kind of work, they would be ideal to spearhead it.
