This is just an unimportant comment :-)
On Wed, 3 Dec 2003, John Levon wrote:
> There are a number of ways in which users can be negatively affected by
> a feature. Sometimes these are critical ("LyX crashed"), sometimes
> merely very annoying ("LyX has a stupid banner in the way"), and
> sometimes marginal ("The insert menu is too big and unwieldy"). These
> affect different users in different ways. Some things may not bother
> user A at all, but a constant PITA for user B.
>
> So, first, we have only a subset of the total user population U. In
> order to get a complaint we have to have a subset of users who are
> negatively affected by a feature. Within this subset, we need a further
> subset of users who actually consciously notice the negative effect
> (research has shown time and time again that users aren't very good at
> identifying what causes an increase in time-to-task-completion). Then we
> have to find a further subset such that it contains users motivated and
> willing to report the problem. This can be constrained by such factors
> as :
>
> "the mailing list looks scary"
> "I'm too busy"
> "I suppose the designers know what they're doing, who am I to disagree?"
> "I'm not using the latest LyX, perhaps it's fixed"
> "Sod this, I'm going back to scientific word (or whatever)"
> "I don't know how to describe my problem well"
> "It's not important enough to report"
>
I recognise several of these from my personal experience with LyX, but
let me add that on several occasions I've simply thought that:
"ok, there's this little problem, but who cares, LyX is still so good"
i.e. parts of for instance mathed are so (bloody) good that you stop
caring about minor problems or quirks.
Now I wish I could remember what some of these quirks are... they are
of course typically (re-)discovered when you're working a lot with lyx,
doing things often, i.e. when you have a deadline coming up :-)
/Christian
--
Christian Ridderström http://www.md.kth.se/~chr
