[imp] Fwd: IMP usability

[Michael M Slusarz]

My 2 cents from my (admittedly) limited involvement in UI design...

Quoting Chuck Hagenbuch <chuck@horde.org>:

| I'm going to answer this, but I doubt she'd mind more data, so if anyone
| else has done any studies, etc...
| 
| ----- Forwarded message from thomure@smithsonite.rice.edu -----
|     Date: Sun, 1 Dec 2002 22:20:01 -0600 (CST)
|     From: Tiffany Thomure <thomure@smithsonite.rice.edu>
| Reply-To: Tiffany Thomure <thomure@smithsonite.rice.edu>
|  Subject: IMP usability
|       To: chuck@horde.org
| 
| My name is Tiffany Thomure and I'm a senior at Rice University in
| Houston,
| Texas.  My friend Mike Hardy gave me your name to contact at the Horde
| project.  I'm in a HCI class at Rice, and for my semester project I am
| conducting a usability test of both Twig and IMP.  I have a few questions
| for you regarding the design of IMP.  If you've got some time to answer
| these, I'd really appreciate it.  My questions are:
| 
| 1) Who was chiefly responsible for creating the UI for the IMP?  Was it
| one person or a group of people?

Not me.

| 2) Did the designers perform any usability research before creating the
| interface?

Don't know.  I have never done any usability research for anything I have
changed other than asking myself "Does this look good?" and "Will this make
sense to someone besides me?"

| 3) Why did they choose to make it so graphically rich?

Graphics are nice for me, not only as a guideline to quickly access what you
want, but just because it breaks up the monotony of tables, input boxes, and
text.  Stuff tends to look very cluttered and complicated, IMHO, if a page
is simply tables, boxes, input areas, etc.  Just adding a few graphics to
add a little of color to a page can make it easier and more desirable to
use, as lame as that sounds.

| 4) After the UI was developed, has there been any ongoing research into
| its usability in the field?  In particular, have you done any usability
| tests, cognitive walkthroughs, or a heuristic evaluation?

For me personally... no.  Although we do get feedback all the time on the
lists about stuff that is good/bad so I guess that could be termed "feedback".

| 5) Were there any usability problems that you encountered, or any drastic
| changes made to the user interface?  What was the reasons behind any
| large changes that were made?

A somewhat drastic change was made be me when I had to implement popup boxes
to obtain a user's passphrase for their PGP keys.  Popup boxes was the best
option because it was best integrated into the overall design of the current
IMP application (read: it didn't require a complete overhaul of the UI). 
The only usability problems faced is the potential that some (older)
browsers may not work with popup/javascript very well.  But I think that,
especially within the last year, the focus has moved away of trying to
comply with EVERY browser but rather implementing new ideas that work with
all modern browsers.  After all, anybody running Netscape 3 or IE 4 should
really upgrade anyway.  I personally felt that I should not forgo creating a
fairly clean UI that works well with most browsers simply because there was
a chance that some older browsers (or even a text based browser like lynx)
might not be able to work with it.  For me, the tradeoff between browser
functionality and features should be skewed in favor of features - as long
as these features run on the vast majority of fairly recent browsers.

Not sure if this is what you were asking, but that's my soapbox :)

michael 

______________________________________________
Michael Slusarz [slusarz@bigworm.colorado.edu]
The University of Colorado at Boulder