ticlog

I just read Plágio Astrals frustrated post and felt like I have something to cheer him up a bit, and also everybody else that suffers from that type of frustration.

My story begins when I asked my son yesterday how school went that day and what homework he needs to do over the weekend. I was particularly nosy because he just started to attend a class on touch-typing, and I wanted to know what he thought about it. If I’d just asked him straight away he’d probably not said anything (like any kid I know), but this way I was steering him in the right direction.

To make a long story short, he finally mentioned a very interesting detail when he said that they use the same program that we have at home as a tipp-trainer at school. So I asked if they really work with KTouch since we are Linux only at home. “Oh, yes “, he said. There is only some sort of School-Linux, as he put it, running on every computer because teachers made so many bad experiences with Windows that it was not worth the effort and the money. Anyway, when they start to have informatics classes, he said, their teacher informs all the parents of that class that they ought to let their kids install Linux alongside their existing Windows installation, if they haven’t done so yet,  so that they can do their homework properly.

If that’s not something really encouraging! And it shows us just how important e.g. KDE-Edu or Skolelinux are.
We just must not be too impatient.

It actually started all with a discussion about what a user friendly »computer« was supposed to behave like when, again, I became guilty of upgrading to the latest release of the software, and immersed myself into one of the last real adventures on this planet: What’s the new features, what does the interface look like now and how, provided I like what I see, can I make use of that. It’s a real joy.

However, there’s another, a different point of view and way of dealing with changes. While I cannot deny that I find changes in the software that I use very attractive, others find them very disturbing. They just don’t want to be bothered when it already worked for them. And it seems to be a major annoyance when, like with the release of KDE 4.2 a few days ago the GUI of KMail was almost rendered unusable.

Imagine! All mails gone! There was only grey bars left with a date on it. But the mails – gone. And anyway, the messages in the list look entirely different now. People got used to the way it used to look and now: Forced to rediscover everything! Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit, but not much.

You and me, we sit there and marvel how devs actually manage to get all these improvements done in just so little time. We push a few buttons, click, click and yes, this I’m gonna use and that – not. In short, we fall in love all over again.

And them? Desperation and endless phone calls with their guru on finding the familiar settings again. But isn’t that the users GNU/Linux and KDE want to attract if we file bugreports like that? Maybe the difference is just how people perceive their world. This reminds me on a screencast Wade Olson pasted (or I think it was him) on the planet once. I think this talk tells us a lot about the problem we are facing here.

Because of all of this I was going to write to kde-pim@kde.org to talk about how we could possibly guide our inexperienced users better when »bigger« changes happen to a user interface. But then, this applies to virtually any application in KDE and so I put this up for discussion to the entire community.

In kdepim this is quite straightforward really. There is the welcome message that can be used to display an introduction or overview of the changes to the user interface that needs to be displayed whenever the program was called for the first time after a change in the version number.

A more general approach could be that with every new version something like the tip of the day with an explanation pops up, but that would mean a lot of popping up with every upgrade

So, what can we do for this group of users so that they can feel properly informed about how to deal with changes? I think there’s a lot to be gained from the point of usability.

The best changes and improvements will be rejected by the users if they don’t understand it.

Having been a GNU/Linux- and also KDE-User for almost exactly 10 years I decided that it was about time to give something back to the community.

Because of my, so I believe, familiarity with KDE after all those years and the friendly community that I found here I started to look for a place for myself in this ecosystem. This place I seem to have found in documentation writing, especially since (as it appears to me) devs don’t seem to be too eager to write handbooks and such.

Because of my poor reputation as a developer I probably better not write code but handbooks and started to do so a few weeks ago by updating and rewriting the KMail-Handbook which seems to be going to be a rather permanent  project for me, now that I come to think of it.

I hope that I will also be able to document here the one or other constructive criticism, lots of praise and maybe reports from a few KDE users that I happen to know and what terms like usability (that is mentioned quite regularly here) mean to them.

And now, back to docbook …