Usability testing IMP3

[Henry Blackman]

Hello.

I'm in the process of rolling out IMP 3.1 at Chester College of HE in 
the UK.  As such we've been performing some usability testing of IMP 
(using RC 1).  We've come up with a few things  that developers may want 
to address.  I thought I should share them with the group - hope that's 
OK and that it's taken in good humour.

The first issue was the most noticed.  In the Compose window of IMP 
there is an icon - Attachment - which right now scrolls the user down to 
the attachment section of the window.  As default though the window is 
big enough to show that section and as such doesn't appear to actually 
do anything.  We found that more than 70% of our users actually 
complained in the testing scenario that they "couldn't do attachments" 
or "how do I get attachments to work".  They preferred the way IMP 2 
worked, with the attachments section above the body of the message.

Users were confused with the "Expand Names" feature in the compose 
window.  Around 40% noticed the icon, but didn't know what it did at all 
and after it was explained found it's presence confusing especially with 
"Addressbook" icon being right next to it.  60% of users just didn't 
even notice the icon, but when pressed couldn't imagine what it would do.

We received a couple of complaints regarding the font in the message 
window.  It's monospaced (class: fixed) and that caused some of them 
problems reading it.  They were older users, and had strong spectacles 
on.  We changed it to Arial in html.php, but that caused the message 
textarea in the Compose window to be too thin and right aligned (ie: 
looking daft).  We thought it might be useful to actually specify 
classes based on the use of an object, rather than what it looks like by 
default.  So in this case calling the class "compose_message_box" rather 
than "fixed" or something similar.  I haven't found any other places 
where this might be useful to do... and I realise it can be easily done 
in our own installation, but it might be useful to be specified by 
default.

Other features that were requested was a "Filter Messages" icon/link on 
the message list window... we didn't want to set up filtering on every 
window refresh/reload because of the extra load on the server (we have a 
lot of users) but users agreed manual filtering was useful as many of 
them stay signed in all day.

Another feature was to bring back a pop-up for new message alert whilst 
in a message view.  20% of users noticed this functionality was missing 
from version 3 over version 2, and while when asked all appreciated the 
cleaner and more functional interface a non-frames version brought, they 
felt a pop-up appearing no matter what screen they were viewing was a 
useful feature.

The last two features that users requested were distribution lists (100% 
of users requested that one!) and read receipts being sent as well as 
being requested.  Many of our users are converted Pegasus users and they 
all love those features.

I should note that all the users testing IMP 3 used only IMP 2 for their 
email provision in the College, and are well versed in web mail.  Every 
user had a positive comment the moment they were presented with the 
message list screen after signing in; and every single user commented 
(without being asked) that IMP 3 is a dramatic improvement and were all 
very excited to finally move over which is happening here on May 1st.  
We'll have nearly 12,000 users on IMP 3.1.

Cheers,
Henry