A colleague teaches a university course on usability testing, and asked if FreeDOS could be a client for his students this semester. This isn't a bad time to do another usability test -- I've been thinking about doing more cleanup on the website, and this test should help find any "rough spots that might need to be addressed.
So I agreed to have the students test the website. We should have their test results in May, and I'll share the results then. Here's a summary of the information I shared with the students doing the usability test: We have 3 basic types of users: 1. People who want to play classic DOS games (DOOM, Commander Keen, ..) 2. People who want to run classic DOS apps (Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, ..) 3. People who want to make new DOS programs (developers) These came from the survey we did a few years ago. I also shared that some folks download FreeDOS so they can install a motherboard BIOS update, but this is becoming more rare these days. I described the users in two basic categories: 1. People who know a lot about DOS. These are probably people on this list, plus some folks who were around in the DOS days and want to try FreeDOS. These people won't need a lot of help about how to use FreeDOS; they probably just want to see what's new, and download the latest distribution. For folks who know DOS but just found FreeDOS, I also said these people would likely know how to use DOS, but may not know the specific features in FreeDOS. 2. People who don't know anything about DOS but they want to download & install FreeDOS anyway. These are the "newbies" we see on the email list sometimes, and on Facebook, and elsewhere. Some might be developers who want to try "retroprogramming" and others might want to run FreeDOS to explore "retrocomputing" (yes, both of those are trends now). They will need a lot more help. Stats: - We average about 10,000 unique visitors on the website every week (average over the last month: 10,306 weekly unique visitors, based on log analysis) - I don't know how many people download the FreeDOS distribution (I don't have those stats .. make your own guesses here, but if I assume "half the unique visitors" then that's 5,000 per week?) - Most visitors are on a desktop system (average over the last month: 85% desktop, 15% mobile) - Overwhelmingly, the most popular pages on the website are the "Download" page (www.freedos.org/download) and the home page (www.freedos.org/). After that, there's a *huge* dropoff on hits, then it's the different "about" pages. - Most of our visitors are in the US and Europe, then (after a big gap) it's Russia and South America, then another gap before other countries/regions. I shared these goals: 1. What I need: I'm planning to update the website over the summer, so I'm looking for what areas to improve on the website. The students will also share recommendations for changes. 2. What is success: I want people to find the information they need by browsing the website, without having to email me or the email list with a question that we've seen a bunch of times. _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
