On Sat, 05 Sep 2009 10:18:13 +0200, Sven Burmeister wrote:
Am Samstag, 5. September 2009 04:57:05 schrieb Jim Henderson: that show that some people on this list, and its always the same group, do not only ask for explanations and accept that new features might not have a value for them while they do for others, but that they like to add some allegations. At that point, "you get it for free so stop complaining" is my answer to those allegations because to me, constructive criticism ends where these allegations are put in by those reporting an issue.
If somebody would simply ask: "How do I get different wallpapers per virtual desktop", he would get the answer.
Same if somebody asked: "Would it be possible to have the "different wallpapers per virtual desktop" with less clicks?".
Yet as you can see in the emails I answered to, they cannot resist to add some allegation.
Sure, when things change and people aren't expecting it, they're likely to complain. I think it's incumbent for the developers to read the underlying message and ignore the perceived personal attacks (sometimes they're there, sure, sometimes they're not, though - it's just someone's poor attempt at humour - not making any judgments about this particular instance as I've not read the messages). But responding "in kind" doesn't really help move things forward. I've had plenty of situations over the years where someone has said "man, that was a stupid idea" to something that I did. What I've learned is that by responding with "well, you're just a stupid user, so what does your opinion matter" is more likely to get the user to escalate, and then things degenerate into a very tiresome flame war. The better approach is to ignore the personal attack and focus on the issues. That will gain you the users' respect (generally - there always will be ones who will just continue). In the situations like the ones you noted, focus on what the issue is - restate it back to the user (but without hyperbole or making it personal) and attempt to understand what the core issue is. It takes practice, yes. I've said before on this list: There's no "law" or "rule" that says a personal attack has to be answered in kind. It's my feeling that we should be focusing on the *issues*. Since the "user" is the "customer", the focus should be on the issues, first and foremost.
The people participating here on both sides of the discussion have a common goal - to make things better. Dismissing user complaints tells the users they're not important. Since one of the KDE project team's goals seems to be to maintain KDE's position in the openSUSE user community as the "preferred" desktop, it seems counterintuitive to me to dismiss the user community's input, instead attacking the people (or being perceived to be attacking - from a PR standpoint, they're one and the same) who are trying to help you turn out a better product.
True and this works very well with most KDE users.
Well, without surveying the users, it's difficult to say if "works well" equates to "couldn't work better", yes? I'm sure there are users who are out there who think that it could be improved, but they don't know how or where to voice that opinion. Or they know where, but they see a discussion like this one and think "I'm not getting involved in that". I've always said that it's important to realize that a support forum (and this mailing list would constitute a "support forum" for the purposes of this concept) is going to be heavily weighted towards the people who have problems of some sort. It's not a good measure of who is and who isn't having a problem, or how widespread a problem is, because only those who find it and have a problem are going to start a discussion. And who knows how frustrated they really are when they post something - and for that matter even if the frustration is completely from the software or some other outside influence?
So while I think it's incumbent on everyone to calm down and discuss the issues rationally and not make it personal, I think it's probably even more important that the developers recognize that when someone raises an issue about something that didn't work the way they expected, they've at least taken the time to provide the feedback to you. That says something about the community's dedication to KDE - if they didn't provide feedback, that would be a bad thing. So let's take the feedback given as first and foremost being offered to make things *better* and go from there.
As mentioned above, constructive criticism without any allegations is dealt with very well and if you read the archives you will notice that its only the same group of people that cannot resist from adding a little extra to their questions or feedback.
Sure, but as I said earlier, focus on the issue, ignore the personal part. Yes, it's not easy to do that at times, and we all slip (you saw my reply to JB2 earlier this week - in retrospect, my reply to his "STFU" message was unnecessary - his childish behaviour stood on its own and I really didn't need to point it out to the list, because it was blatantly obvious to anyone reading it).
You will also notice that KDE devs often start participating in a thread, i.e. answering the question, and then drop-out because the same known pattern of KDE4 bashing starts all over again. I think it is fair that developers do not put up with the allegations and waste their time on those that cannot stay with constructive criticism. Same for this thread btw. have a look at the answer to Will's email.
If an issue has already been addressed, then focus on the issue and say "we've already discussed this" if it's necessary to say anything. I saw John's answer to Will's message there, and sure, I'd agree that John was out of line in his presentation, but the core issue he's trying to express is that he doesn't understand the benefit of activities in KDE4. If you ignore the inflammatory parts of that message and look at the core issue, it seems to come back to "I don't understand what this feature is for and what the benefit is beyond what was in KDE3". To the dev team, that should say "we need to make the benefits of this feature clearer because some users don't understand them". That's perhaps a fair point. (Not being a KDE user at all, I don't know anything about the feature myself). He may also be trying to say "this feature seems overly complicated to me", but that again comes back to "I don't understand the benefit". We could review each and every message and play "woulda/coulda/shoulda", but the bottom line is that the user is expressing that they don't understand something. Reading over David's follow-up, the concept seems interesting to me, but it also seems like it probably wouldn't be something I would use because I don't split my "personal" and "work" environments. It's a pretty dramatic change in using multiple desktops (which I do use regularly) because it focuses a particular activity on a particular virtual desktop. I use virtual desktops differently - it's actually kinda difficult to describe how I divide the applications up between them. Since it's difficult to describe my usage, it would be difficult for me to classify my applications as part of a particular activity. That may be what's the issue here - the paradigm doesn't fit the users' usage. That doesn't make it a bad paradigm per se, but it's one users aren't accustomed to. (At the very least, the users who are raising issues about it aren't accustomed to it). Does that make sense? Jim -- Jim Henderson Please keep on-topic replies on the list so everyone benefits -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org