[844] in Athena User Interface
More on MIT usability testing of GNOME
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Cattey)
Tue Jul 31 17:15:16 2001
Message-ID: <wvNlzWZz0001FvI2MD@mit.edu>
Date: Tue, 31 Jul 2001 21:15:14 +0000 ()
From: Bill Cattey <wdc@MIT.EDU>
To: Sun-Gnome-HCI@sun.com
CC: aui@MIT.EDU
Recently you received a note from one of my employees, Christopher
Beland, which described the results of some of our usability testing of
GNOME.
In addition to our solutions, you may also be interested in our process,
which seems quite similar to the process you used:
An overview of our usability testing procedure and plans is at:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/usability.html
Our testing results are at:
http://web.mit.edu/is/usability/aui/results/results1.html
The text of the instructions we gave is at:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/specific-procedure.txt
After having incorporated specific changes based on our own usability
testing, we have deployed GNOME campus-wide to the Athena computing
environment. Athena supports 10,000 user accounts on approximately 1000
desktop systems (divided equally among systems in locked offices, and
systems in rooms with combination locks available to all MIT affiliates
on a walk-in basis).
The whole effort of the Athena User interface project is in our online
Project Notebook at:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/notebook/
Those 1000 desktop systems are mostly an even mix of Sun systems running
Solaris 8 and Linux systems running RedHat 7.1 with a small number of
systems from other vendors such as SGI.
Information about Athena is available at:
http://web.mit.edu/is/athena/
Seeing the successful deployment of MIT's analogs to your own usability
testing in this large scale way, I invite the GNOME developers to
consider adopting some or all of our solutions as implementations of the
guidelines raised. We might end up saving you folks some work. (And
yes, it would save us changing our look and feel when your improved
versions come along.)
Great job on the usability testing!
-William Cattey (wdc@mit.edu) Leader, Athena UNIX Platform Team.
