Re: [Tails-ux] Quantitative user survey

Teqleez Motley:
>> sajolida:
>>> I started dumping ideas on doing a quantitative survey of our user base:
>>> https://tails.boum.org/blueprint/user_survey/

Hi Teqleez,

I think it's your first email to the list, so welcome!

> I wonder if there should be 2 distinctly different questions about missing features vs. problems/pending bug-fixes.

Note that so far I wanted to discuss the research questions that we want
to answer in the survey. Not yet the questions to ask in the survey.
This would be the next step.

> a) Which features are most missed
> b) Which unfixed/outstanding bug fixes/reported problems are preventing more use of Tails

As you can see in the current research questions, I was focusing more on
knowing better who our users are and what they use Tails for. I bet that
starting with answering these questions will already lead to a survey
that will be long enough (I want it to be quick and simple to answer)
and great findings.

I'm afraid of opening the door for features requests because:

* We currently don't have the capacity of addressing them. We are
still struggling to fix usability issues that we've known for years.
In this regard, we're more interested in learning how to prioritize
them than learning new ideas. That's why I propose to learn about the
"user tasks" instead.

* Asking people what they want is not usually such a great idea when
trying to improve usability. See:

Jakob Nielsen's First Rule of Usability: Don't Listen to Users
(a bit provocative on purpose...)


https://www.nngroup.com/articles/first-rule-of-usability-dont-listen-to-users/

About the famous quote misleadingly attributed to Henry Ford:
"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
horses.":

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/290410

* It's the kind of open questions that make surveys much longer to
answer. It might be good to have 1 or 2 open questions at the end but
we should be careful about keeping the survey super short. And
definitely making the open questions optional.

> Suggested new question:
> c) Do you think it is important/possible that the current start page (where Tails is configured during startup) could be further improved/simplified or is it suitable/good enough in its current form?

By start page, do you mean this:

https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/startup_options/tails-greeter-welcome-to-tails.png

or this:

https://tails.boum.org/home

?

These kinds of problems and possible simplifications are best discovered
doing usability testing. We already did usability testing of Tails
Greeter ("Welcome to Tails!") before releasing it so I would say that's
not the hottest one of our interfaces.

> Btw:
> - Maybe the survey invitation email could also include a (visual) example of exactly how easy it is and where to get involved in reporting problems and discussing feature requests, for those who are still on the fence in terms of active participation.

The survey would be pointed to from the homepage of Tor Browser in
Tails, and not by email. This way we can potentially target everybody
using Tails, not only the people we have the email from.

> Perhaps make a page "showcase" of the "best" feature requests that were taken into account and implemented during the last x months/years, with links/extracts from their actual issue queue messages?
Unfortunately, this is not something we have the resources to do a lot,
so I don't think that the showcase would be very exciting :)

--
sajolida