FESCo Meeting Summary for 20090424

Callum Lerwick seg at haxxed.com
Sun May 3 16:56:08 UTC 2009


On Sat, 2009-05-02 at 01:55 +0100, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> In the end we still come down to making 
> decisions based on the opinions of people we deem to be experts in the 
> field. And if you don't trust the desktop team to make the appropriate 
> decision in this case then it would be helpful for you to say so 
> plainly.

Well, to put it bluntly, no. We don't trust the desktop team and we
*shouldn't* trust the desktop team.

So they're "expert in their field". Fine. Cool. We need experts. But the
problem with experts is they're totally consumed by their field, and
lack the ability to view their piece of the puzzle in the overall
picture.

There's a reason we have release managers and FESCo. Someone has to
manage the Big Picture, and sometimes that requires the "experts" to
compromise their Perfect Vision for the good of the overall project.

... And are we seriously designing UI based purely on "the opinions of
experts"? Is there any actual end user testing in the loop?

Are we honestly expected to trust the desktop team based purely on
"We're experts and we say so!" How reasonable is that? No, trusting
experts is for sheep. We want to see data. Show us usability studies, or
meta-studies of bug reports. *Something* more than "we say so". We trust
data, not experts.

As it is, the people in the trenches doing QA and user support have way
more convincing data than the desktop team.

Designing HCI without Humans in the loop is bogus beyond belief.
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