Hi,
at the Tails Summit this year, a bunch of Tails people met and
discussed how to make UX better and our Help Desk more efficient.
One action item we've identified was to allow users to more easily
report hardware support problems, in particular wrt. video cards:
when Tails does not support a video card, the graphical interface does
not start and so far the user is left with a bunch of unrelated log
messages in text mode, which is not very helpful. Sometimes they
bother reporting the problem and even carefully copy these log
messages but that did not help: without basic info about the affected
hardware, neither our Help Desk nor developers can investigate
the problem.
So we decided that when this happens, we should "display a text mode
message with the graphic card hardware info and a shortened link to
our known issues page / help desk".
I've a proof-of-concept implementation working (see attached
screenshot). I think it's obviously much better than what we currently
have, so I don't plan to block on this discussion before I get it
merged, but still, I'm sure we can shape the error message
much better.
Wanna play? :)
Constraints:
- Deadline for the design: end of January. Then I'll have a few weeks
to implement it. I'm happy to provide info about the cost of
whatever you folks propose here, so we can aim for the best
possible thing we can do cheaply.
- The entire message must fit in 255 chars.
- The entire message must fit in one single line.
- Raw, unformatted text (no colors, no bold / italics / etc.).
- We need enough technical details to know what's the affected
hardware: at the very least, the numeric identifier
("[1013:00b8]"); also including the nicer name ("Cirrus Logic GD
5446") would ease the work of the engineers who'll be tasked with
triaging these bug reports quite a bit, but worst case they can
infer this info from the numeric identifier.
- We need to give a shortened link so the user knows what the next
step is. I've created https://deb.li/TailsNoX that points to
https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/bug_reporting/#does_not_start
but:
- Is it the best place to point to? I guess sajolida may know
the answer.
- "TailsNoX" is short and not too ugly but "NoX" is about an
implementation detail. What would be a better short link name?
(10 chars maximum!)
- We need to give at least a basic indication of what went wrong (I
picked "GDM fails to start") so our Help Desk knows what the bug
report is about, assuming the user takes a picture or copies the
entire message.
Random ideas:
- Shall we suggest the user to send us a picture?
- Shall we explicitly tell the user to copy *everything* they see on
the screen?
Cheers,
--
intrigeri
