[jsword-devel] Usability testing ...

[DM Smith]

Joe Walker wrote:

>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.
>  
>
Be of good cheer :)

>- 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?)
>  
>
Now that Mark wrote the HTTPSwordInstaller we don't need to have tar.jar 
any more in the download. People who want to add the FTPSwordInstaller, 
will have to play with config files and if they are that savvy then they 
can get ftp.jar themselves from CVS.

While on that same note, the JNLP downloads the lucene jar as well and 
again it is not used (at this time).

Perhaps we should prune the jars to only those that are in use for the 
default installation. The others would be in CVS for people who can 
figure out how to use them.

>- 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.
>  
>
This is in bugs.txt already.

>- A language filter on the books download dialog would be really useful.
>  
>
I have thought that such a filter would be useful, too. I think it would 
be pretty easy to do too. The simplest approach might be to have 
language be part of the tree, perhaps at the second level.

>- (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)
>  
>
Another nitpick which Mark said he was going to address. I don't think 
we should ship 1.0 with the Java coffee cup icon as the application 
window icon.

>- (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!
>  
>
We can put instructions on the download page, perhaps w/ a screenshot of 
the dialog boxes that the user will encounter.

>- 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).
>  
>
I keep right clicking on the tab expecting to see a Mozilla style popup:
close tab
close all
close others

>- 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.
>  
>
I personally don't find the passage list sidebar useful. Perhaps that is 
just me.
Having it as an option make sense.

Is the problem w/ blur the word itself? Would another word be more 
obvious: like grow, verse in context, enlarge, ....

As an aside, I worked on a project which needed to create a graph of 
business objects and be able to find meaningful paths between them. We 
faced a vocabulary problem where our non-programming team members had 
very decided ideas about the meaning of all the terms that we would 
naturally used. So we had "Squibs" for nodes, "Ilk" for type of node, 
"Pomp" for attributes, "Circumstance" for connections/edges between 
nodes, and so forth. Or as we put it "squibs of an ilk, with pomp and 
circumstance".

The problem was that while it made perfect sense to us, it was worse 
that using the common terms that everyone would make immediate 
assumptions about. Ultimately, this vocabulary killed the project. No 
one wanted to learn a new vocabulary.

>- 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"
>  
>
This is in bugs.txt already. Perhaps we can add Mark's suggestion of 
pre-building it and storing it on crosswire.org. My only hesitation with 
that solution is that I think that the index will change and it depends 
upon which index driver we use (jsword, lucene, ...) and it may cause 
version issues (if we change the index's storage layout then the index 
is not valid for some version of JSword)

>- 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"
>  
>
I think this is an artifact of the TDI - MDI switching ability. The 
switch does not change tool tips or menu entries.

>- The "restrict match" toggle does not ungrey the restrict search text
>box for best match.
>  
>
I think this is in bugs.txt already.

>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.
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>
>  
>