Sunday April 27th, 2014 by Heiko Tietze

Introduction

To look for a particular system settings can be annoying when you do not know in which control module you have to look for. KDE SC has a bunch of top level categories that partially overlap (e.g. Application appearance and Workspace appearance) or rather seem to coincide to normal users. So it’s a good idea to take this arrangement under investigation.

Method

The common method to analyze data for hierarchical structure is card sorting. Participants take ‘cards’ (in the past, index cards were used which is the reason for the method’s name) that are labeled with the function name. The task is to sort these cards into self- or sometimes predefined groups. The clue of the method is the statistical analysis: a hierarchical clustering (Wikipedia: Hierarchical clustering) reveals common groups, similar names, and presents the result by a dendrogram. There is no better way to balance various individual representations than based on survey results.

Participation

We prepared a study with the major fifty KDE control modules and ask you to participate in the test. Your task is to create as many groups as necessary, to label the groups reasonable (English please), and to file all items that belongs to the group. You do not need to replicate the current organization and to a define a certain number of groups. Create the structure that you think is the best.

And here is the link: http://conceptcodify.com/studies/keodby8c/via/68r99gey/ (Study closed on 06-May-2014; thanks a lot for participation).

Thank you for participating and making KDE even more awesome!

PS: Please discuss important notes at the forum (Thread about System Settings).