From kde-usability Thu Aug 30 13:18:37 2001 From: "Jonathan Bacon" Date: Thu, 30 Aug 2001 13:18:37 +0000 To: kde-usability Subject: Plans X-MARC-Message: https://marc.info/?l=kde-usability&m=99917767305983 Hi all, Sorry if this email is a bit long, but I have triesd to keep it as short as possible. It seems it would be a good time now to formally discuss what we plan to do in the KDE Usability Study, and what we hope to get out of it. This is an important project which could help KDE a great deal in it's use and acceptence, so we need to think carefully. As some of you will be aware, I have been toiling away at the website recently building some facilities that will aid us with the study. I will cover what I have done a bit later. To get us started, let me explain my personal set of ideas for the study, and I what I would like to see done myself. Others are welcome to chip in ideas, and even more importaantly (!) volunteer to help with a particular part. IDEAS > Usability Maintainers < My plans initially with the study were to identify problems with KDE, and I developed the idea of Usability Maintainers. This idea has gained some popularity, and we can see people coming ahead to volunter. The main thing about this initiative is to supply useful, OBJECTIVE reports to the developer. I capitalised objective as this is the main priority. A report maintainer should have the following duties: - read submitted usability problems from users and select pertinant issues - add these issues to a report - liase with the developers to get as many of the issues fixed as possible And optionally... - conduct tests on the applications usability The report maintainers are the core of the study, so we need to develop some guidelines for what makes an objective report. Any volunteers to write these guidelines? > Data Gathering < Another important aspect of the study is to gather research from users on what problems and issues they have with usability. Also to gather research on the type of users that we have and their needs. With this data we can make KDE more suitable to our audience. Data gathering can be done via online questionnaires, tests on real world users and other methods. > Usability Research < We could do with setting up a KDE Usability Research Lab project. In this project we would develop test software to develop new and innovative usability designs. An example would be developing a new method of opening files. We would code a prototype, release it, gather research on what people think and then publish the research. We ideally need usability researchers and developers to get involved in this. We could then develop new and possibly unseen user interface concepts and metaphors. > Test Suites < KDE as it stands forms a lot of content. We need to test this content to see where it has flaws. Examples of tests could include: - Icons - Do the icons work well? Are they and easily understood? - K Menu - Is it well laid out and planned? Could it be improved? These are just two small examples, but we need people to take one of these, develop a test and gather research from users on what they think and then submit a report. WHAT WE HAVE NOW I have been developing recently a usability tracking database. This would enable the following: 1) A user uses an app (eg KControl) and he/she finds part of it badly designed for usability. 2) He/she goes to usability.kde.org and goes to the problems submissions page. They fill in a form to report the problem. 3) The KControl report maintainer can then log in and view a list of reported problems for KControl. He/she can then create a report of these problems. 4) Creating a report is as simple as selecting a problem from the list, clicking Add! and writing optional comments. 5) When all problems relevent have been added, the maintainer can publish the report by simply clicking on a button. The issue is generated and added to the site. This has been pretty much 100% coded. I have a few bugs to fix here and there. Another project is the Question API. This comprises of a number of typical questionnaire questions. These questions can then be simply plugged into a questionnaire to form a questionnaire. This would save us having to write questions every time we need a questionnaire to be written. The question api is early in development but on the go. SO WHERE DO WE GO? Where to now then? Well first of all, we need volunteers for the ideas I mentioned above. We also need the report maintainers to keep writing reports and sending them to the mailing list and relevent developers. When the new database system is ready we can then migrate to it. We also need to develop the research lab. We could do with developing better ways to interact with software and developing prototypes to test. CONCLUSION To conclude, KDE is a great piece of sofware, but it still has lots of work to be done to it. With all the talk of the GNOME usability study and everything, it is particularly important that we club together to work on things. Together we can develop a number of stratagies for making KDE as easy to use as possible. Thasnks everyone for reading this...I know it has been long...and I look forward to your comments. Jono _______________________________________________ kde-usability mailing list kde-usability@mail.kde.org http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-usability