[jsword-devel] Usability testing ...

[Joe Walker]

Hi,

I'm staying with some friends for a night while I'm away with work and
not only are they having to feed me, but they get usability testing
forced on them too.

It turned out to be very painful for me; here's what I learnt.

- Remember the tar.jar failure to download/validate on MacOSX? The
problem is not MacOSX but JDK 1.4.1, Which will probably mean quite a
few MacOS users since that has been the default for a while (Mark?)

- We need some sort of wizard to run when we start to help users
download their first book. It could be as simple as a dialog box
explaining what to do.

- A language filter on the books download dialog would be really useful.

- (picky) There is an drawing error from the [...] passage entry
button, a small while line on the top of the text entry border.

- (picky) The books combo box is too fat. The down arrow looks a bit
silly, especially on small screens.

- (picky) The books combo does not resize properly when space is limitted.

- The splash and desktop icons look naff. (I've got some artwork that
I've been meaning to spruce up a bit)

- (probably can't fix) Sun need to do some usability testing on the
opening Webstart dialogs. "Do you want Bible Desktop to be integrated
with your desktop environment" is secret code for "Do you want a
desktop shortcut", and don't get me started on the cert dialog!

- The function of the tabs might be more obvious if they were there
from the start. Some discussion on this might be useful, though
because it does help to unclutter the place.

- The reference pane gets squashed when a new tab is opened. 

- Tab closing is not obvious (file menu).

- The delete/~1/~5 buttons cause severe breakage virtually always
(list bounds I think, "Given X, max Y" error)

-The whole function of the passage list sidebar is confusing. The
opening sequence after installation of books went: "click on reading,
look at text, click on > to open passage list sidebar, select passage,
get confused, click delete, get repeating error messages requiring jvm
restart. I think that bar can be useful, maybe we need to hide it a
bit more so that it is only found by the more advanced users that will
make use of it? And maybe we need some sort of explanation as to what
blur does, and why it will do nothing to a whole chapter.

- The search indexing is slow! (painfully slow, like 10mins on a P2
with 128Mb RAM) - "why can't it be done when the book is downloaded"

- The difference between Search and Match are not explained, and many
people will expect search to be able to do what Match does anyway -
Maybe match is just a mis-feature? (and if so should be switch to
Lucene indexing?)

- It would be very helpful to have the words searched for highlighted.
(Joe: useful, maybe - impossibly hard, probably!)

- The search entry textarea tool-tip is alarmingly big, and goes away
before you can read it.

- The tool-tip for new tab is "new window"

- The "restrict match" toggle does not ungrey the restrict search text
box for best match.

I'll type the relevant bits into bug.txt when I'm home.

I've blind copied my hosts on this - if they wish to comment then they
will need to either join the mailing list
(http://www.crosswire.org/mailman/listinfo/jsword-devel) or reply to
me an I will pass it on.

Joe.