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by ulnarkressty 1874 days ago
Big fan of your channel.

You mention in the video that the next steps will involve interviewing users and developers to find out more about the software usability and potential issues / fixes. Could you make this whole process and the results public, such that other OSS can benefit from this kind of usability analysis?

There are indeed many resources out there about this sort of process, but I think it would be great to see an expert long-form explaining how they take the interview results and convert them into actionable goals in order to improve the user experience.

1 comments

I'd add to this the thought of supporting a dumping-ground approach where people can throw suggestions, rants, complaints etc "over the wall" into a giant wiki/knowledgebase or bug tracker type environment that accepts OC submissions or just links to external discussions or sources of insight.

Hmm. Now I'm wondering whether such a thing should be run for a finite period, or left open to track improvement over time. Perhaps the system could be cyclic, with "calls for feedback" that would require re-submission into each cycle. This would have the advantage of effectively auto-closing all unfinished work after feedback invitations, but the disadvantage of frustrating repeat submitters of issues that generally don't get prioritized. ...You know what, there are probably good established ways of doing this, Microsoft probably knows this stuff backwards, and the Blender foundation seem to have a good feedback thing going so they probably know a thing or two as well.

Regardless of how it's done, spreading the fact that it is being done far and wide is IMO crucial (eg, getting this onto as many OSS/tech news sites as possible) - and I also think that the _worse_ the signal/noise ratio, the better, as I reckon this would be a good indicator that the long tail of the interesting really-edge cases are effectively being captured!