Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Aug 30, 2016 10:22 UTC (Tue) by andreasn1 (guest, #88420)
In reply to: Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps by liam
Parent article: Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

It's not only GNOME, I would say user research is absent in most parts of the free software ecosystem, and to large parts in the entire software industry.
I think that is fixable by more people learning how to do it, and to succeed and fail with it until they start feeling comfortable doing it as part of their regular development process. I'm especially interested in how something like user interviews can be done by all designers and developers on a development team, both to spread the load and to get a shared understanding of the problems facing the people who'll end up using the software in the end.

Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Sep 1, 2016 13:33 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> It's not only GNOME, I would say user research is absent in most parts of the free software ecosystem, and to large parts in the entire software industry.

Which is why, as a dedicated Free Software user, I feel much more "at home" in the Microsoft world. They do a lot of user research, and it shows. Credit where credit's due.

But they also believe to some extent in a monoculture "one size fits all", and where I don't like the Microsoft Way, I HATE it. Especially when their monoculture attitude destroys the alternatives ...

Cheers,
Wol

Designing mass-transit support for GNOME Maps

Posted Sep 2, 2016 21:53 UTC (Fri) by liam (guest, #84133) [Link]

I know there was once talk about putting together the reqs and tooling needed for user-testing at one of the Boston GNOME or Fedora conferences, but little follow-up occurred.
I know, from those I dealt with, there was a general feeling that there wasn't even much point in doing it (for Fedora or GNOME) because the testing results would be ignored. Rather it, quickly, turned into a discussion about providing the greater floss community with a single resource that explained about the Why for ux "literacy". The main purpose, however, was to provide the means for developers to gather and incorporate data into their projects.
This was, iirc, about three years ago, so the particulars are a bit hazy.