Empowering users to give high-quality feedback: Slides from the IFF
Activity: Presentations on how to report bugs and how to use graphic tools for user feedback.
Takeaway: To help users in report problems they find in software, build guidelines into report forms and make it easy to tag regions on an image.
Too often, software users feel as if the quality of the programs they use is out of their control. We may spend whole workdays cussing out an application that runs slowly and does unexpected things, but our anguished cries dissolve into the void, never to be heard by developers.
And many developers seem to be fine with setting a high barrier to getting feedback, often throwing up their hands in consternation at the quality of our complaints. “What are we supposed to do with these comments? They don’t even make any sense,” they say.
Something is getting lost in translation. Free and open-source software projects tend to work under the assumption that users will participate in improving software. But barriers to giving that feedback are high, as I have written about elsewhere. Asking users to get on IRC, or send error logs, demands a lot of technical knowledge of them. Asking them to get on a mailing list to give feedback demands a lot of time and investment.
Too often, as a result of these barriers, users end up blaming ourselves for software problems. Last year at the Circumvention Tech Festival (CTF), I met an eager and capable technologist from Zimbabwe, who works on monitoring fairness in elections. He apologized sheepishly that he did not use encryption tools as consistently as he had hoped to. They were just so difficult to use. “It’s ok,” I told him, laying a hand on his arm. “It’s not your fault. They’re broken.”
His face lit up. “I like your energy!” he exclaimed. This exchange led to a warm, enthusiastic collaboration between us, testing and working to improve open-source encryption tools.
What can we do to improve feedback between users and developers? Would we, as users, feel more empowered and satisfied with software? There are technical ways to do this, sure, but what if developers tried giving us the information we need to make good-quality bug reports?
To empower users, Georgia Bullen and I have given talks about how to report bugs. Here are my slides for my Bug Reporting 101 session, and a session on using graphic tools to get and give feedback on software, from the Internet Freedom Festival (what used to be CTF).
Clarifying the shape and content of what developers need to hear can have a big, quick impact on expert users. When I gave my bug report talk to a group of localization and translation experts, they looked excited and relieved. “Now I feel like I know what developers are thinking,” one of them commented.
Get in touch if you would like to talk more about empowering users with the tools they need to make their needs clear to developers!
Other useful links:
- Georgia Bullen’s talk on bug reporting, which I used as a starting point
- Mozilla’s guidelines on writing bug reports, which have great detail
