Hi all,
I attended the GNOME project's LAS [1] in Portland this past week, and
one of things that stuck with me was a presentation on usability testing
by Jim Hall. The usability of our configuration language (and the web
server in general) has been something I've been mulling over for a while
now, especially after having spent time on our #httpd channel.
I realize the notion of "usability testing" for an expert-level,
text-based language might be a little odd/controversial. Rather than tie
the discussion to some vague definition of "usability", it's probably
easier to describe it the way Jim did:
Given a group of volunteer test subjects with varying degrees of httpd
expertise, and a set of tasks that (we hope) all httpd users should be
able to accomplish -- can the volunteers actually do the tasks? If so,
how well and how quickly did they do it? If not, what areas tripped them up?
Since using httpd involves manipulation of a text file and not a GUI,
some of the concepts in his presentation don't fully translate, but I
still think knowing the answers to these questions would be incredibly
useful for us. Are there others who would be interested in this sort of
thing? Have we done something like it before?
--Jacob
[1] http://las.gnome.org/
[2] http://www.freedos.org/jhall/uploads/las-gnome-jhall-usability-16x9.pdf
