Package management usability project

[Benjamin Mesing]

Hello,

first of all, sorry for the late reply..

> I'm studying informatics and for my thesis, I want to do research on usability 
> of application installer user interfaces for Debian, targeted towards 
> non-expert users. My plan is to analyze current users' use of and 
> expectations for an application installer tool, (re-)design a prototype, and 
> test this prototype with users. Of course, if possible for me, I'll work on 
> this further on after I'm done with my thesis.
The analysis part is definitely something we are sorely missing.
Everyone of us is more or less guessing what is best for the user. But
do not expect that we believe everything you find out ;-)

> The idea came up because I found that the package management tools were not 
> usable for non-experts and even I had problems finding the right package. I 
> want to use the adept-installer as a basis for user testing and prototyping, 
> and I'd like to incorporate debtags if reasonable and feasable.
I myself find adept very convenient to use, but then I am a technical
user.. You might also give kpackage, synaptic and packagesearch a try.
The latter is developed by me and strictly speaking more a package
search tool than a package manager - but this is also why I find it
fairly easy to use.

> Because the debtags project seems to have emerged from the debian-usability 
> project, I hope to find people on this list who are interested in this 
> project.
Especially Enrico is busy on the usability part and most of us care
about this. After all debtags was introduced to make it easier to deal
with the huge amount of packages. You could try out the tag browser at
http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/index.cgi or
http://debtags.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/search.cgi which uses a keyword
search for tag seeding. Also there are interesting approaches for
finding relevant tag sets. Take a look at some of the recent messages on
the mailing list for more details. There is also Erich's tag clouds to
consider at http://people.debian.org/~erich/debtagcloud/tags.html and
http://people.debian.org/~erich/debtagcloud/tags2.html.
My apologies to those I haven't mentioned in this paragraph ;-)

So you see there is a lot of work going on in this area. Most of them
centered on debtags of course.

> I want to use usability engineering methods in an "open-source way": I will 
> publish my daily or weekly results, the methods and techniques I use etc. on 
> a website (not yet ready to announce), and hope there will be much feedback 
> or support from usability people as well as users and developers.
> 
> Anybody interested? Any critique, positive or negative, is welcome!
Well the problem is, that everyone here (and everywhere else for that
matter..) wants to do a lot of things and has to little spare time to do
all of them, so please do not expect too much...


Regards 

Ben