Like this, LikeBack October 15th, 2006
As you may know, there are several factors that define the usability of a user interface. Aside from quantatively measured data to indicate characteristics such as error frequency or time to complete a task, user satisfaction is also very important. The means for communicating this feedback from the users to the developers has been somewhat problematic.
Jan Muehlig and Celeste Lyn Paul wrote an article (pp. 18-21) about usability in open-source projects, where they mentioned a few issues concerning the communication between users and developers. They described the current ways of giving feedback to developers. Common communication channels in open-source projects are: IRC (chat), mailing lists and bug reports. These channels may be fine for technical users, but they are not well suited for the average user. In effect, the feedback gathered from these channels give a distorted picture of the userbase.
How to address this problem? Sébastien Laoût (the developer of BasKet Note Pads) is working on a very simple yet effective solution, it’s called LikeBack. It gives users an easy way to send feedback, whether to report a bug or to send a thank you-note.
How can this help you? Here are a few advantages:
- Registration is optional, anyone can send feedback, thus you’ll get a better picture of your users.
- There are several ways to integrate this into your application. For instance, you can access LikeBack directly from the main window interface in a development version, but you might want to hide it in the Help menu for the final release.
- The user interface is much easier and simpler than Bugzilla.
- It might reduce noise on the mailing lists.
In short, more users will be able to give feedback which can be very helpful, especially in the early development stages of a project. While LikeBack is already in a usable state, there’s always room for improvement:
- Optional registration lowers the barrier to communicate, but you still won’t know who your user is. It is useful to know whether the user that reported a problem is a novice, intermediate or advanced user. This kind of information should also be sent to developers, so you can which user group share a certain problem.
- The feedback that you get could be anything and this may be undesirable. Sometimes you only want specific information, for instance whether users enjoy a new feature that has been introduced in a development version. LikeBack should be able to accomodate this, in the form of simple questionaires or complete surveys for usability experts.
- The web-interface should allow a developer to easiliy manage tons of feedback. Right now, it looks too Bugzillish. I think the UI should be more like a news reader (à la Google Reader), where you can quickly read/tag/respond back.
At the moment, LikeBack already works great and although Sébastien does not get much positive feedback on his other project BasKet, there is apparently evidence that users will be more likely to share their thoughts. This brings us to the question: why would you (as a KDE developer) want this? Knowledge of your user is essential for usability and if you choose to actively improve the user experience, this will be one thing you cannot get arround. 
Get to know your user. 
Commentary (2)
I don’t think asking the user his computer knowledge is a good thing. For the same reason that “Basic & Expert Modes” are really bad usability “solutions”. People could be geeks and answer “I’m an expert” even if they don’t know the application they are currently using: they are a newbie in regard of that application. And psycologically, nobody would appreciate to answer “I know nothing about computers”. So we will get a lot of “I’m intermediate”. Which is not really a useful information.
It’s planned on the roadmap to add an optional “Survey” button that lead to an online survey.
Right now, as a developer, the web-interface is quite efficient. It shows all comments at once. As it’s not possible to manage every single comment, we are obliged to fly-over the list of comments, and select the most pertinent ones. It’s faster than displaying one message at a time and always clicking Next and waiting the comments to be loaded. Work still have to be done for a fully AJAX interface (adding a comment should be lightening fast, without page reloading). Comments should also be assigned a priority, and duplicates should me marked thus.
Oh, and I said people like to send more “I don’t like / I found a bug / I wish a new feature” comments than “I like” ones. But I also received lot of “I like” comments. Not as much as other types of comments, but that’s sufficient and it helped a lot to validate new features.
Sébastien,
You are right when you say that sending information about the computer knowledge of the user can give false data. However, information such as the ‘role’ of the user (tester, co-developer etc.) can be useful. I also had in mind that there can be a secondary user to file an issue, where the primary user is the one experiencing usage difficulties. This added information can be useful, but developers shouldn’t attach too much value on it, because of possible inaccuracy. But the same applies to the report itself, of course.
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