Re: [kde-artists] We need a Vision!

On Tuesday, March 11, 2014 14:55:13 Björn Balazs wrote:
> UX always serves a certain purpose. There is no universal good or bad.
> In order to provide consistency and hence a smooth experience for the user,
> the definition of what is desired and what not has to be made on a high
> level. We call this a Vision.

This is sensible for specific project spheres within KDE. There can be no KDE-
wide vision of the type you are looking for because the scope of KDE is too 
diverse. Jos, I think, touched on this but I'll expand a bit:

We have libraries for which the audience is application developers.

We have suites like Kontact and Calligra which have very specific targets of 
their own ... and development resource limitations for which adopting an 
external vision is likely to exceed the budget of. Many of these applications 
look to a broad audience on multiple platforms.

We have Plasma which is focused on providing a user platform (rather than an 
application) and has device spectrum baked into its design (as that will be 
critical to its survival in the next decade in ways that are simply irrelevant 
for many/most KDE applications).

There are other examples, but the above is enough to show that there is huge 
diversity in:

* capacity for taking on a vision
* target audience
* intrinsic attributes

The vision for KDE as a whole therefore must, by necessity, be broad and 
ultimately vague. A vision for a specific project (or set of projects) within 
KDE can, however, be focused and targeted.

I *highly* recommend picking a specific area such as Plasma and focusing on 
developing a detailed vision for it.

This will also have the happy advantage of not having to find consensus among 
dozens of teams and hundreds of contributors. Rather, you can work with a 
small number of people and generate something that works for them. 

If that vision is successful *and* it has some generic nature to it, other 
projects can then be encouraged to pick it up. This reflects the horizontal 
structure within KDE. It takes time, but KDE is a very big boat and big boats 
take time to change direction.

> for the vision. During this process, we plan to also again ask users about
> the importance of different aspects if possible. Then we want to discuss

You will never reach "the users" because most of our users are invisible to 
and not in contact with us. We have regular contact a relatively small (but 
very passionate!) group of our users online (and less regular contact with a 
few more), but they are not representative of our overall user base and the 
collective skill level in things like "define a vision" is very low.

I think bouncing near-final ideas that have been cleared by the relevant 
contributor communities off of people is useful as a form of focus group study. 
Even then, it would be far more interesting and useful to talk to people who 
are *not* KDE users right now as a vision needs to do more than preach to the 
choir that already exists.

Ultimately, though, the vision needs to make sense to three groups:

* the people who will be communicating it to the public
* the people who will be doing visual design in support of it
* the people who will be doing the software development in support of it

It doesn't really matter how much a segment of users loves a vision, if those 
three groups are not in sync with it, it won't happen.

Those are also the people who are most likely to know what is realistic and of 
value to the technology and its audience.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo

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