From: Felipe Contreras < felipe contreras gmail com>
To: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 18:35:37 +0300
Hi,
After going through all the feedback, here's the second version of the
proposed survey.
There is a proposal to delay the survey until 3.2 is released, to try
to avoid some of the initial negative feedback of 3.0, I guess. If
this is delayed for 3.2, perhaps there could be a small piece of
software that pops up a notification for this, and perhaps some
notifications in the future.
What do you think?
=== 01. Which of the following images best resemble your desktop? ===
(images of various desktops)
* GNOME 2
* GNOME 3
* Unity
* KDE
=== 02. Overall, how happy are you with GNOME? ===
(single choice)
* unhappy
* not so happy
* happy
* very happy
* completely ecstatic
=== 03. Which GNOME version(s) are you using? ===
(multiple choice, with other)
+ 3.2
+ 3.0
+ 2.20 - 2.32
+ 2.10 - 2.19
+ 2.0 - 2.9
+ pre 2.0
+ not using it currently
+ other, please specify
=== 04. How long have you been using GNOME? (years) ===
(numeric)
=== 05. How do you compare your current GNOME version with the version
from one year ago? ===
(single choice)
* better
* no changes
* worse
* cannot say
=== 06. Does GNOME do what you want? ===
(single choice)
* Everything
* Mostly
* Somewhat
* Barely
* Not at all
=== 07. How happy are you with GNOME in regards to ==
(matrix)
Columns: unhappy / not so happy / happy / very happy / completely ecstatic
+ ease of use
+ documentation
+ language availability
+ accessibility
=== 08. Which other desktop environments have you used in recent years? ==
(multiple choice, with other)
+ KDE
+ Unity
+ XFCE
+ LXDE
+ Enlightenment
+ other (please specify)
=== 09. How often do you use terminal/console? ==
* What is that?
* When I have no other option
* I can't leave without them
* Is there anything else?
=== 10. Does GNOME include code or documentation by you? ===
(single choice)
* Yes
* No
=== 11. Have you contacted the GNOME team? ===
* Yes, successfuly
* No, I don't know how
* No, never had the need
=== 12. If you could change three things in GNOME what would they be? ===
(free form)
=== 13. Do you have any comments or suggestions for the GNOME team? ===
(free form)
--
Felipe Contreras
From: Alan Cox < alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>
To: Felipe Contreras < felipe contreras gmail com>
Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Date: Mon, 1 Aug 2011 16:46:50 +0100
It doesn't tell you much about the environment
Are you using it on
Desktop
Laptop
Netbook
Tablet
and perhaps a question about skill levels/years of computing experience.
That might help understand which user categories want changes. Eg it's
assumed that most of the 'customise it' requests are from experienced
users but I don't think anyone has actualyl analysed that to find out ?
From: Felipe Contreras < felipe contreras gmail com>
To: Alan Cox < alan lxorguk ukuu org uk>
Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Date: Fri, 5 Aug 2011 19:37:59 +0300
On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 6:46 PM, Alan Cox < alan lxorguk ukuu org uk> wrote:
> It doesn't tell you much about the environment
>
> Are you using it on
> Desktop
> Laptop
> Netbook
> Tablet
Good point. Added.
> and perhaps a question about skill levels/years of computing experience.
> That might help understand which user categories want changes. Eg it's
> assumed that most of the 'customise it' requests are from experienced
> users but I don't think anyone has actualyl analysed that to find out ?
That would be interesting. I'm not sure if other people would agree,
but I'll add it on the next version and see.
Cheers.
--
Felipe Contreras
From: Federico Mena Quintero < federico ximian com>
To: Felipe Contreras < felipe contreras gmail com>
Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Date: Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:04:27 -0500
On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 18:35 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
> What do you think?
Keep in mind that Gnome 3 just hasn't been around for very long. Right
now Gnome 3 is most likely only being used by technical people, Linux
enthusiasts, etc. - it has not trickled down to end users yet. We may
have found the top, obvious problems in Gnome 3, but not the long tail
of bugs.
I think the survey would be much more useful with free-form answers,
instead of fixed options. That way you may be able to eliminate one
level of indirection ("oh, most people said 'somewhat', now let's make
another survey to find out why"). While fixed options let you do
amazing web hackery, free-form answers lead to more insightful results.
Back in 2006 I did a survey of the Gnome deployments (i.e. somewhere
around the middle of the 2.x series). These questions were posted to
various places:
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/QuestionsForDeployments
And this is the final report with the results:
http://people.gnome.org/~federico/docs/gnome-deployments-2006/index.html
(At the end of the report there are links to the raw results that people
sent in. Download them and read them; they are short and quite
interesting. Where the links say, "primates.ximian.com", please replace
that with "people.gnome.org" - I can't re-generate the HTML report with
that change just now, unfortunately.)
Let me tell you about some things I learned from that survey:
* Free-form answers work really well. It *will* take you some time to
read them and see how to categorize or weigh them, but it's worth the
effort.
* Being able to publish the raw results really helps; this way other
people can help you extract statistics. Do ask permission from the
respondents to post their replies so that other people can study them.
* That survey probably gave too much importance to the system
administrators themselves - not surprisingly, "better admin tools" was
the most requested thing. However, the survey *did* get us good insight
into end-user's problems.
* Those pie charts in the report make no sense. Apologies for
chartjunk.
It may be very valuable to ask the heads of deployments what they think
of Gnome 3 so far, even if they haven't evaluated it yet on their users
- these people have a very good sense of what will work well for people
in the "real world".
By the way, the main page for the deployments is this (I don't know how
up-to-date it is):
https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/GnomeDeployments
About two years after that survey got published, some people had the
idea of making it periodic - unfortunately I lost track of them and of
that effort. You may want to look around for them; they'll have
interesting thoughts, I'm sure.
Federico
From: Felipe Contreras < felipe contreras gmail com>
To: Federico Mena Quintero < federico ximian com>
Cc: desktop-devel-list gnome org
Subject: Re: GNOME user survey 2011 (v2)
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2011 13:20:21 +0300
On Fri, Aug 19, 2011 at 10:04 PM, Federico Mena Quintero
< federico ximian com> wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-08-01 at 18:35 +0300, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> What do you think?
>
> Keep in mind that Gnome 3 just hasn't been around for very long. Right
> now Gnome 3 is most likely only being used by technical people, Linux
> enthusiasts, etc. - it has not trickled down to end users yet. We may
> have found the top, obvious problems in Gnome 3, but not the long tail
> of bugs.
Which is why I suggested to wait until 3.2.
> I think the survey would be much more useful with free-form answers,
> instead of fixed options. That way you may be able to eliminate one
> level of indirection ("oh, most people said 'somewhat', now let's make
> another survey to find out why"). While fixed options let you do
> amazing web hackery, free-form answers lead to more insightful results.
>From what I can see, you were dealing with a small numbers of
responders, so free-form is excellent, but when you are talking about
thousands of them, I don't think you can do very much.
It might be a good idea to add a bit more of them, but I think the
bulk should be fixed.
> * Being able to publish the raw results really helps; this way other
> people can help you extract statistics. Do ask permission from the
> respondents to post their replies so that other people can study them.
I agree.
> * That survey probably gave too much importance to the system
> administrators themselves - not surprisingly, "better admin tools" was
> the most requested thing. However, the survey *did* get us good insight
> into end-user's problems.
Makes sense.
> It may be very valuable to ask the heads of deployments what they think
> of Gnome 3 so far, even if they haven't evaluated it yet on their users
> - these people have a very good sense of what will work well for people
> in the "real world".
>
> By the way, the main page for the deployments is this (I don't know how
> up-to-date it is):
> https://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/GnomeDeployments
>
> About two years after that survey got published, some people had the
> idea of making it periodic - unfortunately I lost track of them and of
> that effort. You may want to look around for them; they'll have
> interesting thoughts, I'm sure.
While that might be interesting, I am more interested on getting as
many unfiltered results as possible.
--
Felipe Contreras