Package management usability project

[Frank Ploss]

Hi,
thanks for the extensive answer.
But Peter Rockai (adept developer) doesn't think that there's very much 
usability work to do for the adept-installer, so I will look out for a 
different project for my purposes, not package management anymore. Besides 
that, I also think that adept-installer already very usable, and from the 
analysis perspective there's probably no so much to analyse anyway because 
there are not many tasks to take care of.
Sorry for not writing this earlier, but I decided this only a few days ago.

Bye,
Frank

Am So Oktober 1 2006 17:34 schrieb Benjamin Mesing:
> Hello,
>
> first of all, sorry for the late reply..
> 
> > [...]
> > 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

-- 
Frank Ploss
email frank.ploss at informatik.uni-hamburg.de
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