2009/6/16 Vincenzo Ciancia
<ciancia@xxxxxxxxxxx>
The point is not if I hate or not something. The point is "how many" hate this. Now there are two ways to see this. Either you want to use launchpad features as a metric or not. In the first case you compare the number of duplicates, subscribers (not only comments!) with other bug reports. Comments come from vocal persons, but reports do not necessarily. So duplicates are perhaps better than comments.
I was wondering today about this discussion and arrived at a personal conclusion. Let me try to summarize it: Of course, I accept that there are a number of people who don't like this (mis)feature, and I believe their opinion is important. All I'm trying to say is that they are probably not as many or as terribly bothered as some people here try to make it appear. Some messages sound like "this pop-up thing is so horrible that 98% of Ubuntu users will suddenly migrate to Windows because of it, and never come back, unless, of course, our beloved warning icon is reinstated..." I agree that there is a problem, but there is no need to exaggerate it in order for it to be taken seriously.
My guess is that most people actually don't care. Indeed, most people I know don't seem to care about web sites throwing all sorts of trashy pop-ups on their faces. Should I expect them to be deeply bothered by a discreet pop-under appearing once a week? Come on! They're used to computers doing much weirder things on a daily basis. That makes me think however, that their finger memory will dismiss this pop-up/under as quickly and obliviously as it dismisses any other pop-up. The interesting question, then, is how can we motivate people to install updates for their own good, and that without alienating them in the process. I already started to try and contribute in this direction by answering to relevant messages in other threads, and I guess you (Vincenzo) are doing so as well.
If you think that launchpad is biased as you explain, and I certainly AGREE WITH YOU (surprised??),
hehe, no, this is why I'm arguing with you, to start with...
then you have to invent another way. In both cases, saying that 20 duplicates means 20 users is a very bad estimate. You'd need to know the average of users that suffer from a bug w.r.t. those who take the burden to try to report it. AFAIK we do not have ANY CLUE about that. Unless we start messaging a bit in the default distribution about bugs we will never have this metric, but I guess that going out and talking to your friends can give _you_ a good idea on the impression of people about the popup. I did that and reactions are laughters or just "I don't care about updates anyway".
OK, so we'd rather concentrate on the important thing, as I said: How do we motivate them?
Even better: we can actually implement, or mockup in a clear way, the possible design choices, and then in the poll ask users to test each choice for some time, and in the end tell us what they preferred. After all testing is for testing and for reporting. Why must testers jailed into bug finding? Can't they also be involved in the decision process? I will propose this as a separate thread but is ayatana the good place? Perhaps ubuntu-devel-discuss would be better.
If we manage to come this far (and I hope we do at some point) this is already a usability experiment. We'd have to design it properly though, so that results can be considered valid.
Although I'm a
scientist, I'm not an expert in this kind of research, so I guess I'll ask my poll-designing colleagues here at work what they would do in such a situation and see if they have a better answer.
There must be one! Please report your findings.
I will, as soon as I manage to find out something.
Achieving a less disturbing system is, of course, a valuable goal. The problem here is that if your system is, for example, running an insecure network stack or a file system module that may destroy all of your data, you'd rather be disturbed about it.
Yes this was a strongly advocated point in favour of the new system. I just still think that the red-border white triangle with an exclamation mark in the notification area would be as good.
I´d rather think people will ignore both of them...
We could use the testing distribution as a testing environment only for those users who, prompted by a clear question (a popup window maybe :P) when they install karmic (or karmic+1, I do not think we are in time for k), decide to participate in usability tests, involving changing the system in various ways for a week or so and then report feedback in a number-crunchable way.
This is an excellent idea. We may have to delay discussing it, however, until we have something to actually test. Otherwise, we'll probably be discussing at a too abstract level.