Hi,
Ben Coman schrieb:
..
Virtual machine images have long been used by software developmers to run test cases against a known baseline. It would be useful to have a standard downloadable image to run with VMWare Player, so that users can have a second configuration to compare with their own. If they observe it working in the image and that it is not "just OpenOpenoffice", they can more confidently work to isolate the configuration causing the issue, which they can then then report against the baseline.
Further, part of effectively isolating an issue is being able to reliably break a working system. Being able to play without fear of breaking an existing setup would be useful.
For testing purposes I think, it is a very good idea to have a VMware
image. The only problem at the moment I see, is that we need somebody to
setup maintain these images and some web space to host them.
The web space problem could be resolved ... so if we have people who
like to maintian such images, I'm all for it.
The way low-tech users explain problems is sometimes misleading. They often summarise error messages, and remote controlling their PC to "see" the problem is often required. The virtual matching image might include a standard utility to do annotated video recording. This might first be processed by a community help forum.
Further, (not that I've experienced this, but I was taught that...) usability
labs record a user's keyboard-mouse-menu choices to perform some standard
tasks. They run statistics on these to identify the dead-ends users end up in
as they try to discover how to do a set task. The image could be preconfigured
with a standardised tool to generate such reports that a user can send in.
This data could be made available to student research projects or for the
community to organise.
I thought of something similar. But I don't think, this would work for
broad for usability tests. There are three main reasons:
- a preconfigured Image (including a complete Operating System) would
not be downloade by the avarage user
- a avarage user (or a unexperienced user) would not be able to get the
VMWare session running. If he would .. I'd say he is at least at a
intermediate level .. so you'll never be able to get results from newbies.
- last (and definately) not least .. by recording user's input. maybe
video screening and collecting a lot of data, it is very likely to face
legal problems. Many countries (such as Germany) have very strict laws,
how to deal with such data. In fact it is likely that collecting such
data would need to have contract signed. And this is (unfortunately)
nothing what "the community" can do.
All I want to say is, that your ideas are good, but would belong to
something, I would name a usabilty project.
André
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