[darcs-users] Re: argh. please change the name "unpull" (And what color to paint the bike shed)

[Tommy Pettersson]

On Mon, Mar 21, 2005 at 01:46:48PM +0100, Tomasz Zielonka wrote:
> On Sat, Mar 19, 2005 at 05:01:20AM +0100, Tommy Pettersson wrote:
> > The best thing would of course be if we had hard figures from
> > new-user studies.  Then we could draw objective conclusions.
[...] 
> The most difficult tasks would be to think about good questions and to
> analyze the results. I think it would be good to not only ask about
> understanding, but test it, like in a school math test :-)

The kind of study I was thinking of is where you watch the
subjects solve a list of well thought out problems on their
own, with help from the program and manual, and "thinking out
loud" as much as possible as they do it.  You only help them
if they get totally stuck, after thoroughly having questioned
them why.

This will reveal common misconceptions and show what is easy
(takes short) and what is hard (takes long).

But this is only good for new users first encounter with darcs.
Most darcs users will (hopefully) be long term users that
value ease of use more than ease of learning, which what you
propose would be better at capturing.


-- 
Tommy Pettersson <ptp at lysator.liu.se>