list o' importants

[Roger Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

This is a compiled list of "how important is this?" questions,
mostly to get them into one place. The wording is far from polished,
since I'm still aiming for content rather than final presentation.
What I'd like to do is come up with a couple more to fill in the
holes that we have in this list, then focus for a bit on the
'experience/user profile' section, then integrate the two, and try
to assess if we have a real survey at that point.

I think we're approaching the point where we need to sit down and
actually make decisions about some of these questions. (I've been
asking the questions, but I haven't been getting enough answers. So
I might just flip a coin or something and go with it. :)

I have totally neglected order of questions. Please tell me if
any of these are duplicates (some of them are). I have marked with
a ? rather than a * those questions which I think will probably die
a quiet death once we've pondered them a bit more. This list is
finally getting long enough that we can start considering which
questions to kill and which questions to merge (tho new questions
are very very welcome). A middle step we should do is start looking
at converting the more technical wordings into something that people
will actually recognize -- get to the source of why we're trying to
ask the question and how it might be relevant to the user, so we can
ask the right question.

I think Karsten meant for a good half of these questions to go
away in favor of more simplified and broad wordings. He may well
be right, but I'd like to try to strike a balance between an
easy-to-fill-out questionnaire and one that actually gives us good
info. :)

Rank the following in terms of importance (low, moderately low,
moderately high, high):

* local networking (connecting to other computers at my office, home,
  or other location)
* being able to auto-setup local ethernet connection
* wide area networking (connecting two or more locations)
* internet connection (direct)
* internet connection (dial-up)
* being able to dialin to an isp automatically
* being able to use (read/write/both) other file save formats 
  [should probably reword into 'industry standard file formats']
* being able to read the source 
* being able to modify the source [and redistribute, I guess]
* cost, hardware
* cost, software
* privacy (ability to keep other users from reading my files)
* security (ability to prevent unauthorized people from using my
  system(s).
* stability (computer and applications run without crashing or
  requiring restart)
? prompt bugfixes (or hey, bugfixes at all) 
* adding/removing software in an easy and familiar way
* upgrades, ease of installation
* upgrades, ease of finding/getting
* upgrades, price
* having the installation stage for a program verify that all necessary
  components are present and functional
? PnP support in hardware 
? availability of a wide variety of apps (commercial, freeware?) 
* support, vendor [what is a 'vendor' for an end-user, anyway?]
* support, internet [could use rewording. I can't tell if this is
  'newsgroups' or 'ISP']
* support, applications [this needs more thought]
* being able to connect to the machine remotely 
* being able to run graphics remotely 
* running servers (mail, httpd, samba, telnetd, ftpd, etc) 
* speed of graphics rendering
* speed of overall machine
* compatibility with existing systems [hardware]
* compatibility with prior versions [software]
* being able to run something like doublespace (dynamic disk compressor) 
* being able to taskswitch between applications quickly 
* having many large applications open at once [easier than asking
  "supporting >64 megs ram"]
* using a system which protects the user from making potentially dangerous 
  changes to system configuration 

* automatic virus protection (the system takes care of it for you)
* manual virus protection (you run a program to scan or detect)

* automatic hard drive defragmenting (the system takes care of it for you)
* manual hard drive defragmenting (you run a program to defrag)

[the above pair are leading questions. I need to figure out a good way to
word the difference between linux (viruses just don't happen) and windows
(where it's important to take precautions and run anti-virus software)]

* being able to make a backup of your system
* being able to make backup copies of large data files
* being able to undelete files
* administration questions [suggestions?]

* multi-user (several people can use machine at different times)
* multi-user (several people can use machine simultaneously)

* applications (I need to run specific applications on my computer)
* uses (I need to use my computer for specific tasks.  Specific
  applications don't matter as long as they fill the need).

* ease of use (this *MUST* be split up into "what constitutes EOU"
  elements). [no progress here yet :( ]
* consistent user interface (things behave the same way even comparing 
  between two separate applications) 

* having a graphical interface to applications and system
* having a command-line interface to applications and system

* documentation, printed
* documentation, electronic
  [might ask about "documentation, obtainable-from-internet" as well]

* corporate reputation (vague -- good or bad reputation is
  important.)
  Note that responses here scale differently from most of above.  Maybe
  "importance of vendor satisfaction, ..." would fit better.
  I still don't know what a 'vendor' is for our audience. I don't like
  that word -- the computer might come from a different place than the
  support, and the OS from a still different place.

* Support in my native language (how can I ask this so as to not
  have them confuse things if their native language is English?
  "Support for a non-English language"?)

Comments greatly appreciated,
--Roger