Dear fellow UX community & board of directors!
I want to share some thoughts on the Metrics Tender [1] with you.
As I wrote before, I really appreciate the tender, esp. that it is inspired
from our work and intends to improve the situation for UX!
Nevertheless, I see potential room for improvement esp. in two areas:
First, I think it might have been a good idea to do the
"1. planning and conception of features and clicks to track in close
contact with our UX team, with preselection and prioritization of the
features"
beforehand, because the unpredictable outcome of "preselection and
prioritization" makes it much harder for bidders to estimate the actual effort
and for you to know what you will get out of the project. What does in "close
contact with our UX team" mean when it comes to project budgets? Assumingly
bidders will have to bid more conservatively. So overall it will probably be
more expensive and a less predictive outcome for the Document Foundation
compared to doing #1 beforehand and write this tender according to the
outcome.
The second note on the tender addresses part
"4. an opt-in mechanism for the client part, so users have to actively
enable the feature before any data is collected and transferred".
The success of this overall project is closely related to the percentage of
users that participate. I do not question the opt-in mechanism - this follows
our free software philosophy (even though Firefox e.g. does this differently
IIRC). But we would need to do real marketing within the application to
actually convince a decent number of users to opt-in. If the opt-in ends up
somewhere in the wastelands of our options, we will not get a lot of feedback.
I guess the tender could have addressed that more explicitly. This can of
course still be improved in the future.
Hope this helps!
Cheers,
Björn