Replacing network-offline (old version 2xmonitor) with NM wlan 0% signal strength icon

[Peteris Krisjanis]

2009/3/22 Vincenzo Ciancia <ciancia at di.unipi.it>:
>
>> Yep. We're very pleased that there are OEMs selling computers with
>> Ubuntu pre-installed, so that millions more people are using Free
>> Software. And we're happy to accept feedback from those OEMs on problems
>> their customers have with Ubuntu, even if some of that feedback is
>> private. We're not going to make unrealistic demands that they do all
>> their product development in public. We couldn't do that even if we
>> wanted to, precisely because Ubuntu is Free Software.
>
> In my opinion we should rather point to build a distributed usability
> study. Some of us teach ubuntu to ordinary persons; when there are
> doubts about usability, such as the new behaviour of update-notifier, a
> set of fixed-answer questions should be prepared (perhaps starting from
> a discussion on this list). All of us will be able to try this on our...
> patients :) and report how they react, together with some data on their
> age, profession, computer science exposure and so on. Then we will not
> have to choose between observations such as "my grandma would never
> understand the new behaviour of the apache restart mechanism - not that
> she uses linux - or even the PC, though" AND closed-source studies.
>
> What I expect for example is that for the new update notifier behaviour
> we would get a lot of users just getting used to close the window that
> pops up in the middle of their work and ignore the upgrades. But I might
> be proven wrong, so that would be a good question to ask.
>

It is very good idea and I dream myself about something like that for
very long time, but there are bunch of problems - first of all, how to
make OEMs to trust this? (as they will get result and they will have
to work with it) Yes, you can create strong methodology, be very
careful about selecting data and drawing concludions, but still...how
they will now that result isn't affected by some thirty party,
interested in them to fail? How you would ease their paranoia? :)

I see two parts of this which needs solving:
1) Create study platform for testing such stuff like gui changes
2) Create trust to this study platform within interested players -
commercial OEMs, non-commercials, universies;

Propably will need stearing from Cannonical, but I think it can be
done. Even more - I think it is time to get this right.
Freedesktop.org was right way to star this (as on collaboration and
standardizing things), but we need to get to second level.

Cheers,
Peter.