Hi Folks,
Matthew Eernisse and I had a busy Thursday-Sunday last week. We had a really
interesting usability testing session at Oracle, then spent Friday and the
weekend doing a sprint with people who specialize in usability.
Oracle
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Daniel Schwartz at Oracle not only organized the weekend's sprint, he also
convinced Oracle to donate half a dozen engineer's time to doing usability
testing for Chandler. Katie joined us for Thursday and she gave a Chandler
talk to a dozen people at Oracle over lunch.
After lunch, we tested the Web UI, observing two test subjects (friends) run
through a sample script. We should have videos of that soon.
A few takeaways:
- Neither person seemed to have any difficulty with the concept of stamping,
which was gratifying
- Both testers were repeatedly confused about what the active collection was,
and wanted to be able to move or copy items between collections
FLOSS sprint at Google
----------------------
Moderately detailed notes are at
http://chandlerproject.org/Notes/FlossSprint2007
In brief, there were about 30 people at the event, focused on Firefox,
Chandler, and the website WiserEarth. Half a dozen folks (most of them were
Oracle usability people) focused on Chandler. When directed to choose one
usability area to focus on, we decided to go with overlays and collection
selection since that had been a major issue during the testing at Oracle.
Before we delved into overlays, everyone with a laptop installed Chandler
Desktop and gave quick bug reports (several people bumped into the Gutsy menu
bug which crashes Chandler, and the minicalendar isn't drawing/sizing
appropriately on the Mac and Linux).
People did whiteboard mockups of different UIs for calendar selection and
overlays, which can be seen (unfortunately, without much explanation) at
http://www.flossusability.org/wiki.pl?ChandlerUsability#nid5QQ
Matthew focused in on a few of these designs, and did a series of Javascript
prototypes:
The current behavior:
http://www.fleegix.org/demo/floss_usability_2007/proto_0.html
Alternate layout: http://www.fleegix.org/demo/floss_usability_2007/proto_1.html
- Checkboxes on right, so they're less prominent
- Disabled checkbox when collection is selected
- Added "Active: Some collection"
Another layout: http://www.fleegix.org/demo/floss_usability_2007/proto_2.html
- Keep "Active: Some collection"
- Use eye to display overlaid state
- Distinguish between always overlaid (black eye) and
overlaid-because-selected (eye with colored background)
- Allow overlay to toggle even when the collection's selected
All in all, there's a lot of interest from the usability community in helping
open source projects that want feedback. Hopefully we can tap this community
more! To start with, I'd like to have the Oracle folks in for lunch at 543
Howard to thank them for all their testing help, but perhaps there's more we
could do?
Sincerely,
Jeffrey
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