unity-design team mailing list archive

[Vishnoo <drkvi-a@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 19:40 -0400, Martin Owens wrote:
> On Thu, 2010-04-29 at 11:19 +0100, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> > and yet everyone will have their
> > idea of what piece is the most valuable to the most people. The
> > specification describes the things that we believe are the most
> > important for the most people. Those pieces are not revealed as
> > tooltips, but they are more easily accessible. 
> 
> Is this not the kind of attitude I was talking about?
> 
> Everyone will have ideas and will have valuations, but instead of
> combining intelligently an amalgamation between positions you've jumped
> right into defining a group of people who are not everyone and that
> we're destined to have insoluble ideas.
> 
> Ironic is that you could somehow ignore "everyone" and yet be claiming
> to serve "most people's" needs. This sort of logic is obviously false,
> if your not ignoring everyone then you must see value in it and should
> praise it more in the language, if your ignoring it then your not
> serving most people, only your own perception of most people.
> 
> This language to me is combustable in the community, we gotta all get
> better at avoiding this sort of thing to better avoid rocking the
> community boat.
> 
> Martin,

+1 , this is surely combustible .. folks think some decisions are being
truly dictatorial.

The problem here is there is *no* defined user group[s]/persona[s] that
Ubuntu is being designed for. 
Basing designs on "most people", "new user" is not the right way.

If we dont define a group or persona and just keep trying to hypothesize
a user, we will just end up being biased by our personal opinions.

Saying most users dont care , would be a wrong assumption, obviously
there are users who care. It just seems that we dont care for those
scenarios..

First we need to layout who we are trying to care for:
Who is the OS being designed for?
What issue has been addressed here?
If every decision is being made to address a user group , we wont have
such issues.
Decisions/changes need to be made for a reason , to either address a
problem or to improve a behavior.

We need to lay it out and say , 
we will focus attention to get it right for the N user groups first and
then try to get it reasonably good for the N groups. 

We could disown a few user groups too ;) [j/k]
For the power users/tweakers who desire the features we could define an
acceptable path-to-inclusion-to-main of how to include them too, rather
than "wont fix"ing bugs.
[Similar to how there was the mention of merging the colors gconf for
notify-osd.]

For all this we need groups/personas first :)

Also an interesting read:
http://blog.mozilla.com/faaborg/2010/04/22/dont-talk-about-users/


-- 
Cheers,
Vish