[401] in Athena User Interface
Usability testing plans
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Fri Sep 8 09:11:37 2000
Message-Id: <200009081311.JAA01418@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU, sbjones@MIT.EDU, jlittell@MIT.EDU, kcahill@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2000 09:11:34 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
I've finally gotten around to updating the testing plans; the
top-level page is still:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/usability.html
Please let me know if there is still too much lingo in the
instructions.
Susan suggested:
> Let's get five testers, preferably new students who have not yet
> gone to the minicourses. If, as in Beland's plan, we want the
> developers to be among the observers, we should probably schedule
> all the tests in one day. Say two in the morning and three in the
> afternoon with a break for lunch.
The major obstacles standing in our way right now:
- We have yet to settle on a scheme for the menu system. I'm working
on a proposal which I hope to have ready by Saturday or Sunday.
- I was testing with gZephyr, and I noticed it has yet to have
(group) and (topic) labels added to "class" and "instance." It
also crashed when I clicked on the user list.
- There's a bug which is causing subwindows spawned by the panel to
show up in the taskbar.
- It would be nice (but it is not critical) if the "raise panels on
mouseover" bug could be fixed and the Gnome User Manual installed
so more help menus start working.
(I'm punting on testing gkwatch, since Peter hasn't gotten back to me
about that.)
I'd be willing to shoot for a Friday test, but we most of these things
are out of my control. (Unfortunately, I have little clarity to
offer.)
I presume the Usability Team would want to do the actual recruiting of
subjects and whatnot, whenever we do schedule people for?
Susan asks:
> And yet ANOTHER question: how does one attach or add a course locker
> (say) using the gnome menus? Have I missed something?
There's a program called "gmenu" that can do that sort of thing, and
is also what you use to rearrange menu items in general. It has a
number of known usability problems that have yet to be remedied, and
is not ready for formal testing.
-B.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
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