[Tails-project] Learning from users

Hi,

here are some notes from a very inspiring discussion I've had a couple
months ago from Scout, who's with Simply Secure (Cc'ed). Scout: thanks
a lot again!

What follows should be of some interest to our developers, help desk,
UX people, and more. I don't want to do a huge cross-post, so let's
discuss the general bits here, and if you feel there's something in
there that could/should be handled by your own team, please forward it
to them (and Bcc -project@ once to make it clear that you're moving
the discussion away from here).

In square brackets I'll add some comments of mine wrt.
how we're doing.

1. It's important to have communication channels with users, and to
process their feedback [I miss the reports from help desk to -dev@
that were meant to help developers understand what the user experience
looks like.] Some feedback could be prioritized, e.g. what comes
from trainers.

2. We need both a good understanding of who our current user base is, and
a vision of who our project wants to better serve (target user base).
Both. Then 80% of our efforts should be directed towards our *target*
user base, and 20% to existing users. Stating non-goals explicitly can
be useful as well.

3. It's useful to *also* gather general, non-bug feedback. [Do we
advertise any way to do that?] One way to gather this would be a blog
post about the state of the project that says we are looking for
feedback and asks very few questions (with an end date):

* what's the most painful aspect of Tails for you?
* what's the part of Tails you love most?

Another way would be to provide a way to send non-bug feedback from
Tails itself.

So far, we've mostly have done quite heavy-weight usability research.
We could benefit from quick and crappy user studies, e.g.:

* at conferences, his can last 5 minutes / person;
* propose one bug reporter each month to answer a few questions;
* the aforementioned blog post asking for feedback;
* a blog post looking for users who are fine with being interviewed
(offer them a t-shirt?).

We could ask them what are the top 3 things in Tails, what are the bad
parts. We should shut up, listen, and thank them.

4. Rephrasing the WhisperBack bug report template

The sentences should be along the lines of:

* What were you doing?
* What did you expect to have happened?
* What happened instead?

Cheers,
--
intrigeri