[QGIS-Developer] More user-information?

[Richard Duivenvoorde]

Hi,

Got a phone call from an (to me at unknown) QGIS user who asked: "I
opened a shapefile but I cannot edit it.. the little pencil stays
disabled... I googled for half an hour but cannot get it working".

After some Q&A, it appeared that he had opened the shapefile from a ZIP...

So I was wondering: should we be more forgiving to new users, and for
example write messages to the messagebox when people click disabled buttons?
(I googled that a disabled button apparently still fires signals)

I know that for the average QGIS dev/user this is not so strange, but
QGIS is full with "silly things for un-experienced" users. Ask everybody
who runs 'QGIS for beginners"-courses!

As (Q)GIS is becoming more and more used by non GIS-experts, it would be
nice if we give usability a more prominent role.

I also understand that talk is cheap, and making complex things easy is
VERY VERY hard, but still... We do have a lot of clever people around,
which can do this!

Ubuntu Linux some years ago had a project 'papercut': fix as many
'little' usability issues as was possible. And ask 'users' to come up
with those.
I'm not goint to self-injure us here by asking people to tell us here :-)

But what about a 'usability' tag in the issue tracker?
And assign some of the 'bug fix' money to those?
(and encourage people to create 'usability' issues... /me hiding now)

Regards,

Richard Duivenvoorde