Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Máirín Duffy]

On 10/21/2009 11:39 AM, Seth Vidal wrote:
> None of that users issues seem like 'interface design' issues. They seem
> entirely like 'hardware issues' followed by 'not everything works' but I
> don't know how the interface design is at fault.

Well, I'm not talking about interface design though, I'm talking about
user experience.

E.g., what I do isn't just mockups and icons, sometimes it's just
mapping out how things work today and helping come out with a plan on
how they *should* work to be better. Sometimes that involves a tiny
amount of GUI work, but a lot of backend work. Or vice-versa.

> Is it the fault of the interface that there's an issue with X on certain
> graphic cards?

We know Nvidia sucks. In fact, myself and others who replied to this
developer instantly identified after asking him what hardware he was
running that his Nvidia video card was likely the culprit.

But how could we expect him to know that?

Hardware incompatibility is a fact of life for that, and that's okay. I
don't think we should wait until the end of time for those issues to be
sorted out. But if we know Nvidia cards tend to cause a bad experience,
couldn't we have detected the card early on, and maybe presented some
kind of, 'Hey, you've got this piece of hardware. It might cause you
some issues. You might want to check this wiki page (or whatever) for a
list of common problems and workarounds for this card. Sorry that this
had to make your experience with us a little bumpy, but let's get you
around it!'

Same with the anaconda crashes he was having in the partitioning screen.
Apparently it was a known issue:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Bugs/Common#Installation_fails_with_DeviceError:_cannot_commit_to_disk_sda_after_5_attempts

How could we expect him to know to even look for the known issues wiki
page? How would he know it existed?

Could we do something to maybe highlight that page as pre-requisite
reading before install a well or at least point out its existence in
case of FAIL? Sure, maybe this just means adding some information or
links to the get.fpo page. But maybe there's a way involving the
installer UI itself that we can address the problem.

> I guess I'm having trouble figuring out what you want to fix here.
> 
> If the issue is the interface design - then great but I daresay the
> present interface is not "terrible".
> 
> If the issue is you want all hardware to work no matter what then I 
> think you're tilting at windmills.

Does the above make more sense?

~m