[Libreoffice-ux-advise] ux-advise advice

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Jean,

On Sat, 2012-02-18 at 14:00 +0100, Jean-Francois Nifenecker wrote:
> Ah! Ah! I'm starting to get the real thing which has nothing to see with 
> what I was presented at first: this list is in *no* way for users to ask 
> for a change/enhancement to the devs!

	Right - we have few-to-no mechanisms for users to ask devs for things,
beyond bugzilla and perhaps some user surveys if someone wants to put
the work in to set these up. This is in large part because we have a
factor of ~a million more users than developers. It is hard to think of
a functioning system that can deal with 10^6 random conflicting opinions
-per-developer- and filter them in a meaningful way.

>  It is all the way around: the devs are those asking for advice to
> the world.

	Preferably not the world, but some known-sane-and-decisive UI /
LibreOffice feature experts, like Astron, Christophe, Regina, and
others.

> So, if this is the actual goal, telling people in the users' discussion 
> lists to come here is plain *wrong*.

	If there are UI experts who have a view, they should be here, such that
when people ask for advice they can give it. That advice should not be:
"I vote" or "+1", but "have you considered XYZ interaction", "how will
this fit with ABC other feature" etc. - the level of discussion is
pretty useful on ux-advise currently along these lines. I'm constantly
pleased by the depth of experience and understanding of our feature-set
we see here.

> Now I have a much clearer view of this list usage. It seems I goofed and 
> pissed people off without even knowing I did so. Sorry for that.

	That's no problem :-)

> -> I guess TDF should make things clearer to the outer world and 
> internally. *Much* clearer

	Fine - please write up some new blurb for the list description, and/or
edit the wiki where it refers to this to some new, more descriptive /
balanced position.

> Thanks again for answering and giving me a clearer view about UX. It's a 
> shame that those who participate (hey, Cedric!) are themselves directing 
> people here while we (I) should go elsewhere (ie, [design]). Then they 
> feel pissed off... Doh!

	I didn't read his mail; but I suggest that if a hacker has asked for
input here, and there has been no negative feedback, and that decision
is taken then he did 100% the right thing, and anything else is just
time-wasting fluff. Possibly we'll revisit the decision in future.
Certainly if there is concrete code, and someone making the status quo
even better then we will.

> PS: wrt the text boundaries thingy, do you know if that feature 
> discussed on [design]? If it was not, then we're in a catch 22.

	The hacker implementing this improvement would have asked for advice
here first, at least that's the typical flow. I see no catch 22 there.
If you have a strong desire to see the code changed, then you need to
jump in and change the code :-) it is not incredibly hard, given that
the existing patch can be identified I suspect -but- it takes work:
hacking is real work, and just talking about work takes time away from
doing real hacking.

	Next time some sort of change happens in this area, I expect the same
thing will happen, asking for advice here. Having said that - there is a
-very- delicate balance here. If the experience of developers asking for
advice (or improving the UI) is one of unmitigated pain, angst, flaming,
unpleasantness, impoliteness, etc. then they will simply not ask (or
worse not even try to improve the UI); and that is an outcome I -really-
want to avoid. It is extremely easy to complain, and extremely painful
and unpleasant to deal with those complaints.

	All the best,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot