[416] in Athena User Interface
Usability testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Tue Sep 12 20:14:16 2000
Message-Id: <200009130014.UAA04543@Press-Your-Luck.mit.edu>
To: sbjones@MIT.EDU, aui@MIT.EDU
In-reply-to: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 2000 20:14:14 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
> Now that classes have started, what's the development status of
> gZephyr?
gZephyr is currently not compiling under Linux; maybe it will be by
October. (Alternately, we could try moving to the Sun platform. I
don't know if there are any critical bugs that we'd run over, but
there are a large number of Sun-specific ones in the tracking system
at the moment.)
So Susan has a point about gmc. One major motivation for the current
round of testing on the rather incomplete system is to get a feel for
how much of a difference giving people Gnome will make in how much
they like Athena (in terms of usability, aesthetics, etc.).
We've decided not to test:
- System speed
- System stability
- Session management (known to be ookie)
- Customizability
- Web browser (nothing's changed)
- gKerbometer (not ready)
- Mail reader (nothing new to test)
- Documentation (not installed, not Athena-specific)
- Printing (not ready)
- Everything else that's not ready
We'll be testing their ability to make quick edits with a text
editor. I assume we'll just be throwing Emacs at them and expect to
discover that they stumble over it? Or would people be willing to
agree that something better is needed, and trying gEdit instead?
This leaves the following components that are actually new to the
system:
- Panel
- Menus
- Window manager
- WebMoira
The top explicit user tasks being e-mail, word processing, and web
browsing, none of which we're really touching unless we swap in gEdit.
The top implicit tasks are logging in, manipulating windows, starting
programs, and manipulating files (not sure of the order there). We've
hit two out of four...
I think we should swap in gEdit and gmc. We're basically asking
people "what has changed that you like/don't like?" I think people
would be likely to like both these changes. If not, that would be
very useful to know. They probably won't say anything one way or the
other if nothing changes on word processing and file management, and I
think that would be less useful. I think making the changes would
also tend to make people's end-ratings more positive, which would be
good. (We'd hate to get ambiguous results and make management
nervous.) Especially since we fully intend to make even further
improvements in file management soon anyway... why should we cut
ourselves artificially short?
> - There's a bug which is causing subwindows spawned by the panel to
> show up in the taskbar.
>
> If we're actually around at the same time, please demonstrate this to me,
> I'm unable to duplicate it unless the failure case is more specific than
> stated here.
I tried this on a cluster machine today, and the bug was not
manifested. Grr. Probably some OS upgrades I've taken that the
cluster machines haven't broke this.
I really do wonder about the fragility of Gnome on layered
machines...but it's hard to say how much of what I run into is caused
by doing development on the same machine. Anyway...I'd be willing to
meet, decide what we're doing, and do a runthrough on Friday. Right
now, I should get back to arranging menus.
-B.
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
MIT STS/Course 6 (EECS) - MIT Athena User Interface Project
===============================================================
