kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Mitch Davis <mjd+launchpad.net@xxxxxxxxx>]

Yo.

On Sun, Sep 6, 2015 at 6:34 AM, Jacob Schmidt <tiger12506@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>
> is remarkably unintuitive; making a footprint is EASY, saving it is
>>> HARD.
>>>
>> Where is the unintuitive part? Select library, save footprint; end of
>> the story. Slightly more complex if you use the master board repository
>> approach (see manual for that).
>>
>> The "Select" button sends us to the "Library Browser" when assigning a
>>> footprint to a schematic symbol, and that feels like I just travelled
>>> back to the dark ages.
>>>
>> Can't really relate with that since 90% of the times I simply *type* the
>> footprint name, but maybe that's depend on how you have the library
>> organized. Agree that having to click thru for selecting a footprint is
>> not optimal but that's expected to be used for lesser modifications, as
>> I said before. *Could* get better, I agree on that. Would need
>> volontaries for that :P
>>
>>
> A video response, as it were:
> https://youtu.be/h7DaMB7lPnA
>

I too struggle with this.  Every single time.  For every new project
there's five minutes of pointless trial and error while I work out how to
create the first footprint in the first project library, and hook it up to
my board.

We can learn a lot by watching how others use our software, and Jacob's
video is a great example.  I think our response shouldn't be "Jacob, you're
doing it wrong, you should be doing it this way", but "what leads people
like Jacob to think our software works this way, and how can we change it
so the guesses people make turn out to be the right ones"?

Many years ago, Sun paid to have a useability study done on StarOffice (now
OpenOffice/LibreOffice)

  http://www.openoffice.org/ux/reports/2001/berkeley/

The lessons learned from watching, recording and analysing how regular
users use the software were fed back into StarOffice, and usability went up
a great deal as a result.

There are even some folks who are very interested in usability of open
source:

  http://openusability.org/

--because I'm frustrated, nothing more.
>

A basic rule of the service industry is that for every customer who
complains, there are 100 who had the same problem, but didn't speak up.  We
need to look at how people new to KiCad use our software.

Mitch.