[Usability] GnomeShell User Research Ideas

[Kirk Bridger <kbridger shaw ca>]

I've been thinking more on GnomeShell, Gnome users, and how usable 
GnomeShell is going to be to them.  My request for comments from the dev 
list on my persona ideas (1) was met with silence, so perhaps my ideas 
were not yet solid enough to be useful to anyone else.
I'd like to take another tack with GnomeShell (possibly returning to 
Personas later) - user research.  In my quest to create personas I 
realized we don't really have any solid data (that I know of) as to how 
Gnome is typically set up, used, etc.  So why not tackle that first?
So I've set up a page on User Research on the GnomeShell wiki (2), and 
wanted to get the minds of the usability list looking it over, adding to 
it, expanding on it, etc.
The general idea is to do a quick survey of how specific features are 
currently used by our user base.  Since this is focusing on GnomeShell 
I've so far focused on workspaces, panels, applets and windows.
Does anyone have any comments on the ideas I've laid out on the User 
Research page of the wiki?  I don't think creating a script to collect 
the data would be hard (for some data, possibly impossible for others).  
We need to figure out what data, and where it would be stored.  Then we 
can parse it, collect important data bits, etc.
Check out the Windows 7 presentation from MIX09 (3) as an inspiration.  
It's an hour long talk, but interesting insight into Microsoft's 
methodology (and their access to usage data).

Kirk



(1) 
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2008-November/msg00043.html
(2) http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/UserResearch

(3) http://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/C26F