RE: Galeon target users?

>-- Messaggio originale --
>From: Tommi Komulainen <[email protected]>
>To: [email protected]
>Cc: Erich Schubert <[email protected]>, Lee Willis <[email protected]>,
>   [email protected]
>Subject: [Galeon-devel] Galeon target users?
>Date: 12 Oct 2002 13:09:02 +0300
>
>
>On Sat, 2002-10-12 at 12:31, [email protected] wrote:
>> >-- Messaggio originale --
>> >From: Erich Schubert <[email protected]>
>> >Subject: Re: [Galeon-devel] Ideas/Regressions
>> >Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2002 20:08:51 +0200
>> >
>> >I'm not talking about pure power-users, but of not stripping galeon
of
>> >functionality many users like.
>> 
>> You said galeon is designed for power users, and that's bullshit.
>> If there are still parts targeted to power users in galeon I consider
them
>> bugs.
>
>So who exactly are the target users then?  I think that has become less
>clear since galeon1 was obviously on power user crack :)

Yeah 1.0 was. Some previous versions was a lot less so.

It's really hard to say what is the target users for the whole team. I guess
users I target and users, say ricardo, target, are very very different.
I have very clear what my target user is and I guess it make sense to say
it (once again ;)), hoping to be able to make it clear with my sucky english.
I target the vaste majority of users that doesnt have specific interest
in computers but use computers to get their work done. This sounds very
generic but the only way I think I'm able to show it is by examples.
My girlfriend (again ... sorry) use computers to write letters, keep lists
of clients at work ... She use a web browser to find documentation about
his work, to decide which movie to see ... She doesnt have any interest
to learn about web pages internals, to learn gestures, to apply a particular
css to his page. I see she could benefit from a better css, but she for
sure doesnt want to learn what a css is and how to write it. So, no, I dont
think galeon should have the css crack we had in 1.2.
Would she spend time learning gestures ? No, not really, it doesnt matter
if they would make her work a bit faster. She _doesnt want_, she _doesnt
need_ to be educated about computers, she has different interests. Does
she need many cool features in a web browser, does she have fun trying them
out ? Again, no, not really. The simpler the browser is, the better.
Is my girlfriend totally stupid about computers -> we could ignore her maybe
? No, she isnt. She got two works and she was ever the more clued of her
office.

So now I tried to define who I target, let's try to delimit better the field
defining who I dont target. I dont target most of you reading my mail :)
I dont target most of people submitting bugs on bugzilla. People active
in the free software obviously have fun trying out new coolness, learning
about a crack feature that would make their work faster, learning what javascript
is and when it's better to turn it off. But this is not the real world.
This is a very small community with specific interests.
I know in this way I risk to lose "visible" users. (It's just a risk, I
have a small hope hackers could learn to like simple things too ;)).
But my target is not to gain the higher number of "visible" users is possible.

In conclusion I'm trying to hack for real world people, not for computer
geeks. I do so because I believe free software is actually _closed_ for
most people. If we want to make it really open we need to start to focus
on real users needs and not on our small community needs.

Unfortunately I did not have this very clear when I started galeon and I
contributed to grow a community where these interests are not shared.
But I dont have any interest spending my time for a closed community of
computer geeks, so I could not get used to it.
I'm convinced there is a way to not fork the project. Experimenting a simpler
ui by configure switch is just one of them.

Marco




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