[PLUG-TALK] Usability

Keith Lofstrom keithl at kl-ic.com
Wed Nov 30 19:13:28 UTC 2005


While way overshadowed by the Jeff Waugh talk and the surprise
appearance of Mark Shuttleworth Tuesday night, there was an 
interesting CS seminar at PSU Tuesday afternoon.  David Novic
from UT El Paso spoke about usability testing.  His talk was
about how usability evolves over time.  His test subjects were
school teachers learning how to build websites with an IBM tool.
He followed their progress over 2 months, and found that 
usability and frustration issues are distinct from initial
learning issues.  Usability tests that focus on how easy software is
to learn may be missing important lessons from more experienced users.

But the interesting thing about this talk was a slide that he showed
about how these teachers resolved problems and frustrations.  Reading
the manual accounted for approximately zero percent of solutions, 
while talking to classmates and co-workers accounted for 52% of 
solutions.

Think about that.  We typically blow people off with "RTFM", but
in fact people RTFM rarely, and prefer to talk with colleagues and
work things out together.  Like we do on these mailing lists.  

There may be some deep lessons here.  Open source is about community
and sharing and conversation.  While we expect people to RTFM, in
fact we spend a lot of time answering questions that a few hours of
digging through code and bad documentation could also answer.  Though
some people growse about it, most of us *enjoy* answering questions
and showing our stuff.  With wikis and websites and mailing lists,
we communicate and form into a community easily.  Some of this is
helped by the good manners of our frequent question askers - Rich
Shepard comes to mind as a champion of the well formed question.

This tells me that developing more community tools, making it easier
to communicate and share and just hang out together, may be as 
important as developing computation tools.  And though I love good
documentation, we may capture a bigger audience just by opening a
friendly conversation with them, and dropping RTFM from our replies
for a while.  Perhaps we can also work with newbies as "question
coaches" - helping them offline to rephrase their questions to the
list in a more answerable way.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl at keithl.com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs



More information about the PLUG-talk mailing list