Hi Priss, Thanks for writing this up. These quick n' dirty drive-by
usability sessions are really helpful. See more below.
On Mar 14, 2007, at 10:53 AM, Priscilla Chung wrote:
The following are notes and highlights from a recent interview of a
Casual Collaborator user:
http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Journal/InterviewCosmoZeroDotSixUserS
Last week I was invited by 'User S' to participate in a meeting.
The meeting date/time was to be scheduled for the following week. I
sent an e-mail to User S with instructions to 'add a time on my
calendar and send me e-mail confirmation from the application.',
and pasted my read-write, bookmarkable URL to Cosmo. User S went
ahead and added an event on my calendar.
It would be helpful to fill out User S profile? Where do they fall in
our pantheon of Target Users? What would User S use this for? Maybe a
name like Jehosephat?
This describes a perfect example of the Casual Collaborator usage
scenario and the tenet we set out to do for the release of Cosmo
0.6. (Cosmo 0.6 tenet: http://wiki.osafoundation.org/Projects/
CosmoZeroDotSix#Tenets).
*Highlights of the interview:*
+ When clicked on the URL provided in an e-mail, it crashed in
Firefox 1.5.
+ Clicked on the calendar and tried to enter event, but nothing
happened. The expectation was to see quick item entry as in GCal.
Never even thought of double clicking.
What did they try to do after the quick item entry was no where to be
found?
+ Regular user of GCal and uses 'http://rememberthemilk.com'
+ Had trouble resizing the event, didn't see the cursor mouseover
change- might have been broken the first time?
Perhaps the cursor was not a strong enough visual cue? (Resizing
the event worked during our interview.)
I think we should probably re-test this to see how serious a problem
it is.
+ Entered in the event in the event details, manually. Didn't like
to do everything manually, expected some date pickers, auto
complete (in the 'go to date'), min-cal when entering the date, etc.
This is after failing to resize in the calendar canvas?
+ Expected an auto save, especially after having to enter
everything manually. 'It didn't auto save my entry and if I lost my
connection then That sucks.'
+ Found time zone to be confusing. User does not think in terms of
only cities, but also the time zone. It may not be so important in
San Francisco vs. Los Angles, but in Chicago it would be more
important if the person is not sure if the city is in Central vs.
Eastern. There's that extra step where the user needs to to
translate in their head the time zone into city location & the
respected time zones, ie. EST, PST, etc..
I can see that. What are the downsides of not using the 'standard'
time zone names?
+ Selecting 'Status' was confusing because he didn't know if it was
the event status of the sharer or shar-ee? When adding the event,
it was defaulted to 'Tentative'.
Defaulting to Tentative sounds like a bug? I can understand the
confusion over event status when sharing.
Also he didn't have to log in so it was confusing.
What was confusing, having user event status without having to log in?
+ 'e-mail this event' should ask me this regardless (when I save
the event). For example a reminder pop up dialog window.'It would
be annoying on my own calendar so I may not want to see it if it's
my own calendar'. In the end e-mail he forgot to e-mail Priss to
confirm the event or the updated event time change because there
was no reminder.
+ Additional visual comments on the calendar canvas, mini-cal.
?
A personal note: There is still a great deal of work ahead of us to
get this right, but I believe we did what we set out to do for the
0.6 release.
Yes, it's huge that we now have something concrete enough for people
to play with. Thanks Priss!
Mimi
-Priscilla
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