[wp-hackers] New WP profile page

[Travis Snoozy]

On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 15:22:49 +1300, "Christine Davis"
<christine at neato.co.nz> wrote:

> You remember how well this list trying to agree on a code commenting
> convention went,  right?

I didn't say reach agreements on the list. I mentioned focus groups and
question' askin'.

Agreement isn't necessary to answer a question, and it's not necessary
to do research to better understand your users and their needs. "What's
your favorite color?" can get a dozen different answers, as can "what
do you most frequently do with the Admin interface?" There isn't really
a wrong answer to either, but each can be useful in making design
decisions.

The hardest part about using the list for focus group activities would
be to keep people focused on outlining problems (*not* solutions), and
preventing people from getting sidetracked in unproductive arguments
over opinion. Aside from that, this list would be a dream come true for
marketing research -- it's full of a bunch of talkative folks who
already use the product, care about its development, and are willing to
share their thoughts for free.

To specifically respond to your example -- there was a lot of
discussion re. what the commenting convention should be, but the
take-away was that certain folks had certain needs that could be solved
by a common commenting convention. That's just one solution, though,
and the conversation spiraled around the solution, and not the problems
that needed to be solved (documentation; specifically, "When the f***
was that function introduced?"). Note that Ozh _solved that problem_,
but using a completely different means[1].

The list is good at finding problems. Maybe not so good at finding
solutions, but it's good at finding problems. And you have to know what
the problems are, and where they are, before you can try and attempt to
engineer solutions.



-- 
Travis 

In Series maintainer
Random coder & quality guy
<http://remstate.com/>

[1]
http://planetozh.com/blog/2007/10/wordpress-functions-implementation-history-tool/