Hiiii, So Jon said this: "Grab one of us on IRC, IM, phone, train, email etc and make a case for what you want to see. Understand that this will be somewhat easier once you've built up a reputation for being full of awesome. But mostly we need people with skill, vision, sanity, and positive energy helping us make Fedora all that we know it can and will be. Seriously, bring it. You have great ideas? Want to help form the vision of the future of computing? Show up, build trust, be awesome." With this invitation I am wondering if anyone is interested in getting involved, together with me. I have an idea (I talked to Jon about it last week I think) for a project to help improve the Fedora experience for our desktop users and I wanted to see if anyone is interested in helping out: = Improve our install experience = Jon showed me last week how terrible our live media install experience is. We definitely need to identify all the issues and work through ways of improving it. The installer itself, regardless of the live media installer, does need some serious help, as does the firstboot application. The anaconda team has put a lot of efforts in F11 and F12 towards a storage system rewrite, and if you follow Planet Fedora you've likely seen some of my mockups and discussion around the storage UI design improvements (I think they won't hit F12 but should make F13): http://mairin.wordpress.com/2009/08/12/anaconda-advanced-storage-devices/ But there's screens and scenarios those mockups don't cover - *plenty* of room for improvement. I spoke with Chris Lumens and Peter Jones on the anaconda team, and if in the F13 time frame we can get some nice designs and usability suggestions lined up, they said they would be happy to work with us to get those improvements into F14. On top of this, such a project is a good opportunity for folks to get involved in improving Fedora's overall desktop experience - no matter what desktop environment camp you're in, since anaconda and firstboot are a bit agnostic there. :) Think you might be interested in helping out? Here's some suggestions on how you could get involved: - mmcgrath put together some videos of the install process on both f11 and ubuntu this week for another purpose, but he made them available in case we wanted to do a comparative study. I could definitely use some help going through these videos, taking notes on them, doing a comparative analysis (sounds a lot scarier and harder than it actually is, trust me), and brainstorming some solution to the issues we identify. The videos are here: http://mmcgrath.fedorapeople.org/compare/ - We now have a usability lab, and it would be cool to put anaconda and firstboot through some tests using it. :) Even though the usability lab equipment is here in my office and you're not, there's a ton of work that goes into usability testing that doesn't involve the equipment - especially the up-front prep work. One of the most important work items for this is putting together a task script for the usability tests. Here's the script we're using for the Fedora Community tests as an example: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraCommunity/UsabilityTestingRound1/TestScript You can even run through the testing script on your own without the fancy-pants equipment. Grab your friends or your family and help contribute to the data pool! Of course once we've got some data I'll need some help going through them and doing the analysis work. Here's an example of this work-in-progress for the Fedora Community usability tests: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraCommunity/UsabilityTestingRound1/AnalysisAndTakeaways If you are interested in either of these work items, reply here or drop me and email and we can set up a time to chat. You don't have to be a developer or a designer to do this work, and it would help make a big positive impact in our user experience. If you work with me to identify the problems and brainstorm some solutions, I promise you some of my design time to create mockups so we can then make a case to the developers to make those improvements happen. Please please please give it a try :) ~m -- Fedora-desktop-list mailing list Fedora-desktop-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-desktop-list
