Better user feedback and better user experience (idea)

[Sander Devrieze]

2008/12/17 Scott Ritchie <scott at open-vote.org>:
<snip>
> If it's that users blame the distro when it's a Wine problem, then we
> can present them with some sort of information before installing (or
> perhaps running) Wine.  After that we should get out of the way and let
> them use Wine as normal.

Wine should go out of way when the Windows application is known to run
very well under Wine or when the user submitted feedback for this
application in the past. Also, the user easily can skip the dialog.

> If the problem is that we're not getting enough feedback, then a default
> feedback nag might not be the best answer either.

>  Writing an elaborate
> system to tell us about known problems isn't particularly helpful;

It shouldn't be an elaborate system: it can be as easy as asking the
user to click on a button to send a list of API calls, used DLLs, a
hash of the .exe binary, some critical information of his system,
amongst others to the Wine project. User based input in the feedback
form may or may not be a good thing; I just gave this as an example;
it is no necessary element in what I am proposing.

I guess this kind of feedback can be very powerful to Wine coders to
create statistics like these:
* Most popular API calls
* Least popular API calls
* Most common API calls that make applications fail
* Unimplemented features used by very uncommon software (e.g.
custom-built applications within companies)
* Predicting the likelihood that a specific API call will be used when
another API call is used in an application

Maybe this information can be useful to detect which applications are
affected by a bug in Wine. When this is known, testers can verify in
multiple applications if the bug really is fixed in all applications.

> reports from stable or nonlatest versions would be largely ignored, and
> users of the latest beta can be asked to contribute in other ways, such
> as on the download page itself.
>
> Remember, it doesn't take much work for us to know that an application
> doesn't work - a single bug report can do that.  Once we have that, we
> don't need to ask a million other users (literally) for confirmation.

Only geeks file good bug reports. Normal people don't care and will
not spend energy on this.

--
Mvg, Sander Devrieze.