Recent Doc Team meeting - Poll idea (Do people really use computer-based help?)

[Penelope Stowe]

On Fri, May 9, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Peter Matulis
<peter.matulis at canonical.com>wrote:

>
> Thanks for your thoughts Penelope.
>
> I think polling Ubuntu users is good enough since there are former
> Windows/Mac users among them.  But you raise an interesting point:  do
> we want to know whether a user will even *look* for in-computer help?
> My original idea was to determine to what degree Ubuntu users first
> *know* about it and, if so, whether they *use* it.
>
> I would rather avoid a hypothetical question such as: "If you were an
> Ubuntu user would you look for in-computer help?".
>
> Thoughts?
>

I was thinking of a more OS-unspecific question such as "Do you know how to
find in-computer help and do you use it?". That could be asked to anyone
using any OS. Having run a poll for the Accessibility Team that was not
targeted at just Ubuntu users or technically savvy computer users, I'm
happy to share what techniques we used for advertising the poll so that we
got as many responses as possible. (In my experience, it is easier to get
non-technical users to respond to polls regarding technology than many
people realize). Even if the decision is made to only poll Ubuntu users, I
think there needs to be a discussion on how to make sure as broad a number
of users are polled as possible. I'm not sure that just sending out on the
mailing lists would include a wide enough range.

My concern with limiting to current Ubuntu users in such a poll is that in
my experience, the more tech savvy the user, the less likely they are to
use in-computer help. Among the people I know, it's the non-technical users
who use the in-computer help. They are also people who tend to currently
not use Ubuntu, but would if it was something installed for them. My
concern is that if we were to only poll current Ubuntu users, we'd likely
end up removing in-computer help which would then make it harder to "sell"
Ubuntu to non-technical users. That's fine if we're okay with not expanding
to a less technical user base, but one of the things that has been said for
the entire time I've been involved with the project is that one of the
goals is to make Ubuntu accessible to everyone regardless of technical
ability.

The other concern of any online poll is that it will inherently exclude the
chance for people who don't have internet access to give their input. Since
that's another group of people who likely depend on in-computer help, it is
a group that needs to be factored into any decision to remove the
in-computer help. Hopefully people who have experience with Ubuntu machines
in areas where internet access isn't ubiquitous would be able to give input
on how much removing in-computer help would be a problem. I don't
necessarily that concern is a reason against doing a poll, but I think it's
a reason why a poll can't be the only factor into a decision on removing
in-computer help. (I'm not saying I think you meant it should be, but it's
easy to fall back onto data from polls even when they don't tell the entire
story).

~Penelope
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