6 Feb
2013
6 Feb
'13
11:51 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 8:34 PM, Devin Anderson <surfacepatterns(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote:
I will for sure try and do some evaluation for you! I think I have enough
time for that this weekend even. I'll send you a personal e-mail about this
later today =) Love your enthusiasm/openness!.
Cheers
HI Gabbe,
I hadn't considered this. If I created such a
survey, I would be
concerned that my own bias would be injected into the questions
themselves. Can you suggest a few sample questions that might exist
in such a survey?
Generally, it's all about thinking about what you're actually after. For
example, simple open questions can be good (Like: "Do you experience any
issues using the interface? Please briefly describe them.") for getting a
general knowledge of where problems might lie. Maybe you've been messing
around with MIDI for several years and take for granted that your users
know that just aswell, when the fact might be that this is one of their
first experiences with MIDI. Also, leading questions are to be avoided
under any circumstances. For example "Do you like feature X?" is a bad way
of trying to find out if your features are good, as it implies you should
actually like feature X. If feature X shows up automatically in a question
like "Are there features you like in the program? If so, please describe
briefly which and why." it's way more accurate. I think the potential
"please the experimenter"-bias is a bit bigger here aswell when users might
feel they owe you to like the software as it's free, which also leads to
more biased answers unless handeled right.
But generally, starting off with fairly open questions to get a general
idea of what people have issues with is a good idea, until you have some
actual knowledge about what the issues might be.
http://www.nngroup.com/articles/ten-usability-heuristics/ <- that's also
something to take a brief look at. Those heuristics are frequently used
when doing quick training of evaluators for usability, and might be worth
looking into when looking over your own UI. Evaluation using this could be
very effective, and easily taught to people. Maybe we should look into
having a couple of people getting trained with that (resources available
online for free naturally, and training is fairly short) so we can aid
developers in Linux Audio if they want the help. I'll look into this, I'd
love to get some more experience with evaluation anyway.
c) Provide an easy way to donate. Some people
actually have a good income
and can without a doubt donate money. Nicely asking to donate spare cash
if
you're satisfied could probably generate some
donations this way, if
people
also are somewhat frequently reminded of it.
I could add a mechanism like this to (a).
I have some experience of both UI-design and the
principles around that,
and
also constructing good surveys, and I would love
to help out in any way I
can. Like someone else in this thread said, not everyone can code, but
that
shouldn't stop them from being able to
contribute.
I can't speak for other developers, but I find your suggestions to be
very helpful.
On a personal note, I would absolutely love feedback on the UI design
of both midisnoop and synthclone. I don't have a problem with either
UI, but UI design is *not* my forte, and I have a bias about the
intuitiveness of both UIs, given that I built them.
Thank you for all your help and feedback. :)
--
Devin Anderson
surfacepatterns (at) gmail (dot) com
blog - http://surfacepatterns.blogspot.com/
midisnoop - http://midisnoop.googlecode.com/
psinsights - http://psinsights.googlecode.com/
synthclone - http://synthclone.googlecode.com/