Re: [libreoffice-design] Think, don't just do - WAS: Impress remote

2012/5/3 Stefan Knorr (Astron) <heinzlesspam@googlemail.com>

>  > To be honest, I don't have a very positive experience with user
> research.
>
> Hooey... out of genuine curiosity: where/how have you collected your
> experiences?


Some firsthand experience from a few school projects, plus observation
based on Mozilla's and Canonical's (and perhaps some other companies' that
I can't recall right now) user tests.

So not much experience at all.

> > > From my experience, in most cases, the problems with the current design
> are
> > so blatant that designer can rely on his own experience with the software
> > and so painful that the designer wouldn't even think of including them in
> > his proposal.
>
> To some (largeish) degree that's probably true in LibO... but user
> research might at least _help_ with priorisation of problem points. As
> in, you or I or [design team member] are not the (only) people whose
> problems we are/we should be trying to solve.


I didn't mean to say that user research is useless -- far from it. In a lot
of cases, it's genuinely helpful.
I just meant that, right now, if you look at the topics we've covered with
our whiteboards (color handling, Template manager, the Options dialog,
...), the faults there are obvious and the designs that we create turn out
miles different from our previous implementation, so IMHO any user testing
we'd have done there would have been a lot of effort wasted for very little
(if anything) gained.

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