[Design] FLOSS usability testing

Philippe Bossut pbossut at osafoundation.org
Fri Oct 26 10:50:17 PDT 2007


Katie Capps Parlante wrote:
> - initial experience on the desktop (improved with bigger data set?)

Personal anecdotal experience (install and demo Wednesday morning) shown 
me that this is an issue: there's a lack of initial starting points and 
this new user looked at the almost blank slate with a petrified look. 
First thing he did: check the Help menu for a documentation but we have 
only "About", "Faq" and "Report a bug". I shown him that there's a 
clickable link to the ChandlerProject website in the About box but 
that's somewhat buried. He liked the Getting Started Guide and suggested 
we add that in the Help menu (as we do for Faq). Other suggestion: 
bundle a pdf version of the Getting Started Guide so that he can print 
and doesn't need to be online to consult it. It didn't feel like having 
more OOTB items would help that much.

Would be nice to get more than this single observation. Adding a menu 
item in Help to browse to the Getting Started Guide would be a trivial 
thing to add for instance.

> - parsing in quick entry field (ultimately useful for both desktop and 
> hub)

This feature demos *very* well and wow people. Finding out what people 
do spontaneously with it and where are the rough points would help make 
it easier to discover and use. Fixing bugs related to this feature (bug 
8168) is on our list for the next few 0.7.x (thanks to Andre for arguing 
his point in Bugzilla on that one :) )

Cheers,
- Philippe


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