On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 3:09 PM, gonzalo diethelm <[email protected]> wrote:
>> Wow! Finally a real usability test! Great! The more of these the > better! > > My thoughts exactly. When was this experiment done? Who coordinated it? > Will we have a more detailed description of how it went, including > things we should improve? It wasn't _meant_ to be a usability test, that is just how it turned out :-( About half the problems we hit were trivially solved by fixing the wiki on the spot. Things like "oh yes, you need to install a C++ compiler for Windows..." Thank you, Wikidot... Things to improve are above all the critical path for newcomers from reading the front page to getting a hello world program running in their language. There was no confusion regarding the website and navigation, but serious confusion about what to download in what order in order to accomplish what, especially given the random dependencies for different versions / languages / operating systems. IMO until we have binary packages of every flavor, we need explicit tutorials like the one I wrote for Python et all on Windows: http://www.zeromq.org/docs:windows-installations. And then we need to ask people, "choose a language and an OS" and then send them to the appropriate tutorial. It's a lot of work to do 20 languages and N platforms but we could cover 90% of users with Windows and Linux and C, C++, Java, and Python. Regarding the Java explanations there is apparently a class name ('main'?) missing in front of one of the examples (latency test afair). Didn't have time to check in detail. My conclusion from this experience was that at least 30% and perhaps more of people who come to 0MQ wanting to try it will give up in confusion. This ratio will grow as we hit the mainstream and more 'ordinary' developers rather than the experts that make up most of this list today. - Pieter Hintjens iMatix - www.imatix.com _______________________________________________ zeromq-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.zeromq.org/mailman/listinfo/zeromq-dev
