From kde-devel  Fri Mar 09 07:53:17 2001
From: Paul Campbell <paul () verifarm ! com>
Date: Fri, 09 Mar 2001 07:53:17 +0000
To: kde-devel
Subject: Re: KDE Usability Study (was Re: User Interface guide)
X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-devel&m=98415344029719

On Friday 09 March 2001 19:24, Jonathan Bacon wrote:
> > Hello all,
> >
> > I just thought I would let everyone know that myself and Lee Jordan are
> > in the process of building a KDE Usability Study to test for many of
> > the UI interface flaws that we may not realise.
> >
> > Lee is currently maintaing a website for the study while I am getting
> > the KDE booth at the UK Linux Expo ready. We are going to conduct the
> > research at the Expo, and should have some usable figures after.
> >
> > We are just getting the test conditions and test questions ready at the
> > moment, and anyone who is interested in contributing should get in
> > touch.
> >
> >    KDE Usability Study Site: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~f9913820/kde/
> >    UK KDE Linux Expo Booth site: http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~f9808590/

I've been involved in this sort of thing in the past for products I've worked 
on - IMHO the most usefull sorts of things involve relatively 'naive' users - 
people who haven't used your product before (maybe some that have used other 
similar products and some who haven't used any) - basicly you put them in a 
room with a list of tasks to perform by themselves - you videotape their 
actions (mouse movements, key strokes, mistakes etc) - you can really learn a 
lot from doing this.

I suspect that something like this is a really hard sort of project for a 
distributed group like KDE to do - however it might make a great senior-year 
research project for a student at a university somewhere ....

	Paul
 
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