Usability Reviews #1 Revisited

destraynor

Thursday, July 20. 2006

Usability Reviews #1 Revisited

Thanks for the feedback about the usability podcast everyone. Hopefully we'll do another one soon. We've taken on board all the advice re: sound quality, reflective backgrounds, etc, so hopefully it will be a bit slicker when you see us next. This is just a quick revisit of the last shows topic, Bugzilla, motivated by a comment from Sebastiaan. Technorati Profile

It could be so much better, but (as I mentioned above) please come up with idea how it could be better.

Good point Sebastiaan, it is one thing to piss and moan, its another thing entirely to offer a solution. It reminded me of a post a long time ago by Dave Cahill...

If you're going to spend all your time giving out about a situation, maybe you should spare some time to detail what you think the alternative is.

Usually when possible I try to offer my advice on improving the situation, sometimes it works and things improve, and other times what I consider to be good suggestions are ignored for obscure reasons. Nonetheless, here is my effort at a User Friendly bug submission system for a product. In this case, The Gimp. Click on the image to view the page in action.

pic of the submission system

The things to note are...

  • Only one page, no hopping from section to section. Makes it much faster than the current way
  • It's written so that most people can understand what each of the requests are
  • Optional Contact, you don't have to hear about every developers opinions
  • Whilst we've lost Component Information, and some other areas, I would wager we've only lost what an end user wouldn't be able to explain anyways. Those questions could be saved for the "Developer Bug Submission page"

For the sake of completeness, here is what I'd like the follow up to look like

Anyways, enough about Bugzilla for this year I hope. I'm not sure if we'll get time to suggest improvements on every product we discuss, maybe as we go on our viewers will throw in a few ideas of their own as well :-) Next posting in this category will be podcast #2. We have yet to decide what products will be discussed, so I expext it'll be 10 days/2 weeks before the next airing. Thanks for your time.

Links

  • Killing Mockingbirds Dave Cahills post about what you should think about before you talk
  • A PHPBB Improvement Inspired by the last post, Andy realised that maybe common folk aren't too familiar with the syntax of the PHP Date function :-)
  • Make it Easy to Download the Gimp A while back I wrote about how difficult it is to download the Gimp. I flagged it as an issue, and provided a suggestion. This is the outcome.
  • Usability Reviews Our Video Podcast about the usability of software.
Posted by Des Traynor in Usability Reviews at 18:34 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

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This website is the online diary of me, Des Traynor, a User Experience Researcher in Dublin, Ireland. I work with Contrast.

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