Comment 621 for bug 532633

As near as I can tell, I'm probably one of the few (or maybe only one) on the thread who has commercially/professionally dealt with the consequences of a development group's "rash" UI decisions in a product they support, and the types of users that come after you with pitchforks and torches afterwards. Let me tell you, it isn't fun. None of those types of users (the pitchfork/torch wielding ones) are on this thread, not will they likely see this thread. They won't be going to Google to see why it's broke, but they are going to give their IT guy an angry trouncing and be done with it. It leaves the IT guy in a bad position, and Ubuntu in a worse one ultimately. A "minor" change that hardly affected me at all, it's had a 100% negative (sometimes violent) reaction from 20 users I've polled. Although they softened up when I said, "what if there was something useful replacing it?". But if nothing replaces it where is the user's carrot/incentive? At that point there is only anger... Very frustrating for me since it makes me look bad after having pushed Ubuntu so hard for the last couple of years. I've been pushing hard on Windows users (who don't want Office 2007 and shifted to OoO) to go ahead and switch, since most of their normal apps already are dual platform.

For UI related changes, it generally takes 6 months to a year of study, focus groups, marketing researchers doing blind studies on users, etc etc. Not cheap. So far I've only seen maybe 3 weeks here of debate, and still no tangible reason to switch. We're still missing the carrot. Unfortunately there are none of us on the thread who are "qualified" to give research data back. Why? Basically we're all over-qualified for this. All of us will skew the results one way or another, not intentionally but since we know what it's about and for, we will change the results. Better to get "blind" test subjects who have no clue what's going on, or why they're getting tested, or what the testing is even about. It's going to take a marketing research firm, and multiple test groups across the globe to get some data back. Not cheap, but it needs done. Course, still need to figure out what data is being collected, and why. Which means the unknown "unobtanium" feature on the right portion of the screen needs completed to a beta level...