Overview

Between the 23rd of June and 12th of August 2010, the Launchpad team ran a survey aimed with the intention of learning:

• in what roles people visit Launchpad
• what Launchpad users like and dislike about the service
• whether Launchpad users would recommend it to other people.

The team promoted the survey using Launchpad's Identi.ca and Twitter accounts, Facebook page and the Launchpad blog.

* Not everyone answered every question.

Those results in detail

What best describes the role that most often brings you to Launchpad?

179 people gave a response in the Other text box. The most common response was some variation on "end user".

What do you like most about Launchpad?

Common themes:

• Integration between tools
• Integration with Bazaar
• Collaboration between projects and individuals
• Completeness
• Centralisation
• Clear user interface/ease of use
• The applications themselves:
  • PPAs
  • Translations
  • Code hosting and review
  • Bug tracker

Selected quotes:

• "It's home!"
• "The Karma system is kind of neat."
• "It is very complete and lets me manage my software from a to z without having to install a lot of stuff on my laptop. It is also a good way to centralize the versions of my software and its management. And also: its design. It is awesome, and a real pleasure to use."
• "Rosetta is pure awesome"
• "Launchpad Answers site. It's a jewel the too few Ubuntu users know about. Great resource for solving issues efficiently and with minimum noise."
• "That it supports most of the development lifecycle. It's very nice that all of it is cross-linked and it's very easy to jump, say, from a bug report to the branch to the project release to a question etc. Having a way to create .debs also comes handy."
• "Code Management; absolutely amazing, it's easily my favorite part of Launchpad"
• "PPA's are really nice!"
• "Best bugtracker out there as far as I'm concerned"
• "it's a linux thing...linux things are groovy"

Download the responses (pdf)

What do you most dislike about Launchpad?

Common themes:

• Lack of a wiki
• Slow
• Lack of git integration
• The user interface: confusing, hard to learn, not discoverable
• Poor search
• Blueprint generally

Selected quotes:

• "Terrible usability, problematic navigation, poor linking between pages related to a software in different contexts, http 500, sticking to a single vcs, hardly working background processes of rosetta."
• "Sometimes clunky-- e.g., not able to automagically crop/resize images for avaar. (not that hard, relaly)"
• "SLOW SLOW SLOW SLOW page refreshes take forever, and forget it if its a bug from hell with 100+ comments, I open a tab and go and take a leak"
• "Missing git support. With git in place I wouldn't keep any code on github. I love Launchpad's bug tracker. I love Launchpad's translation integration. I'm not that into bzr."
• "The UI can be very intimidating to new or inexperienced users. Some easy to access documentation would be helpful."

Download the responses (pdf)

What was the last thing you did in Launchpad?

Common themes:

• Made a translation
• Reported a bug
• Updated an existing bug
• Uploaded a package to a PPA
• Pushed to a Bazaar branch

Selected quotes:

• "Uploaded 40 packages today"
• "Merge new features to the trunk branch of my project"
• "Translation suggestions and review"
• "I asked for help setting up a printer"
• "Released a new version of my software"
• "I went to Lake Forest at 6:00 pm to attend an hour meeting. No one was there?"

Download the responses (pdf)

Would you recommend Launchpad to a friend of colleague?

Simple analysis

The people who responded to this survey were self-selecting and presumably not representative of the Launchpad userbase. However, the responses to the survey offer some interesting information.

Looking only at these responses, one could say that:

• People like Launchpad enough to recommend it to someone else.
• Translations and bug tracking are our two most used and liked features.
• Code hosting and code review are very well appreciated by those who use them.
• People like Bazaar but many would also like support for other VCSs, Git in particular.
• More people like the centralised nature of Launchpad than dislike it.
• A lot of people want to see wikis in Launchpad.
• The UI is confusing to new users but experienced users find it easy to work with.

• When comparing Launchpad to other services, people seem to mostly prefer Launchpad but there is some desire to see Launchpad work, in some unspecified fashion, more like GitHub.

Comments

• Wikis we can do, speed we can do, native git? Not so sure about that (thumper)
• Your comment (your nick)