Desktop Summit Gripe Session

December 21, 2005 4:49 am General

At the end of the usability part of the recent internal Solaris desktop summit we handed around a survey for people to fill out what they enjoyed most about the summit, and whether it had reached their expectations. It was all mostly positive, which sets us up for doing it again in a couple of months. Of the responses that we got, we found that many people had enjoyed the ‘Gripes Session’ and wondered if we could organize a usability hackfest next time around.

During the gripes session everyone had a chance to speak up for what things really sucked in the desktop, and we wrote up a list of them on the whiteboard. I quickly did a writeup of that session. We only scheduled an hour for this, and John was super keen to get as many gripes listed down as possible – as a result some of the issues weren’t properly identified, and the write up certainly reflects that. At the end of the session everyone was given a set of 10 stickers for them to put beside the issues they felt most strongly against, and they were as follows –

  • Media Support
  • PDA Sync
  • PDF Viewing
  • Release Model
  • Keybindings
  • Fonts
  • Community Engagement
  • Building GNOME

You’ll notice that there isn’t any suggested solutions. While I did do a short write up on some of top issues and how we’ll likely tackle them within Sun, I don’t think it’s quite fit for publishing just yet. Hopefully next time we’ll organize more time, and start a few hacking sessions off to fix them – definitely more fun than performance work, although DTrace has made that rather fun recently.

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