[85] in Athena User Interface
Re: 15.279 survey; usability testing
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Christopher D. Beland)
Sat May 27 03:29:51 2000
Message-Id: <200005270729.DAA26205@No-Whammies.mit.edu>
To: aui@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: The events that comprise the history of the universe.
Date: Sat, 27 May 2000 03:29:43 -0400
From: "Christopher D. Beland" <beland@MIT.EDU>
I've put a tidy and complete PostScript version of the report (which
includes charts and things) at:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/evaluation/15.279-survey/survey.ps
It's ~11 megs; a less happy but smaller HTML version is at:
http://web.mit.edu/aui/evaluation/15.279-survey/soffice-5.2b/
These are brought to you by the new Star Office 5.2 beta release,
which I am helping to evaluate for possible Athena integration.
(Actually, this report was a wonderful test document for the MS-Word
2000 compatibility of various tools. I'm eagerly awaiting a similar
test drive of the new ApplixWare beta for comparison.)
Anyway, you may be wondering what the new "evaluation" directory in
the locker is all about. In addition to actually helping build stuff
(right now I'm breaking in my brain on a little applet) Bill has asked
me to help with planning for usability testing of the AUI Gnome
prototype. As it happens, I've also been doing academic research on
the interaction of individuals and groups with various current and
potential future computing infrastructures, including Athena - though
my department is STS, not Course 15. 8) (Actually, I'm also partly
Course 6.)
I'm just now beginning to integrate relevent bits of information,
including the project notebook, back messages on this mailing list,
15.279 survey results, etc. Sometime soon, I'm going to brainstorm
some ideas about precisely how usability testing might be conducted,
and make some (probably long and rambling) posts to the list. We can
see what sort of things we will need to discuss about the process, if
not actually reach consensus on them. (Hmm. I'm rather in the dark
about the usual way of doing this sort of thing here at I/S, if there
is one, so please feel free to make process suggestions. Otherwise,
I'll just make it all up as I go along. 9)
Yours in software engineering and meta-processing,
Beland
Who will probably have more questions than answers
P.S. - For your command-line Word-to-HTML conversion needs, check out
http://www.wvWare.com. Apparently, mswordview has evolved into a much
spluftier set of tools (though, alas, not splufty enough to convert
the 15.279 report properly, at least not the way I compiled it).
===============================================================
Christopher Beland - http://web.mit.edu/beland/www/contact.html
Got spam? Stop it at the source. http://spamcop.net
===============================================================
