unity-design team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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Hi everyone

There's been some great activity and enthusiasm on this list over the
past few weeks, proposing and discussing designs for various elements of
Ubuntu.

Let's try something a bit different now: finding potential usability
issues in an existing program. The formal name for this UX process is
"heuristic evaluation".
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic_evaluation>
<http://usabilitynet.org/tools/expertheuristic.htm>

Basically the idea is to put yourself in the mindset of someone using
the system, and ask yourself questions like:
*   Is it obvious what's happening at each point?
*   Is the system efficient to use?
*   Is it visually attractive?
*   Are any errors well-explained and easy to recover from?

Jakob Nielsen has a good list of usability heuristics.
<http://www.useit.com/papers/heuristic/heuristic_list.html>

Now, Robert Ancell has asked me for a usability review of the latest
version of Sudoku that he's been working on. We thought it might be
interesting to see if people in the Ayatana community could evaluate it.

If you'd like to have a go, Robert has provided the new gnome-games in a
PPA. <https://launchpad.net/~robert-ancell/+archive/gnome-games>
In Synaptic, add the PPA ("Settings" > "Repositories" > "Other Software"
> "Add..." > "ppa:robert-ancell/gnome-games"), then "Reload", then "Mark
All Upgrades", then "Apply" to get the new version.

Then launch Sudoku, and start writing down possible issues. Remember,
the point is not to think of design improvements, but just to identify
possible problems. And you don't need to go into great detail in each
one. For example, here's a couple I just found myself:

    *   Sudoku icon shown in Gnome Do doesn't match icon elsewhere
        (principle: consistency)

    *   "Clear Tracker" button doesn't seem to do anything
        (principle: visibility of system status)

Once you're done, reply here on ayatana@ with your list, and we'll see
if we can collect some useful feedback. Have fun!

Thanks
- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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