Hi David, > Of course, a really good idea would be some actual user/usability testing! > Figure out what tasks we want people to be able to do, and what we want > them to get from the page, and then <gasp /> see if they can do it!
True. It is interesting though how to do such in a distributed way (I mean we are not sharing the same location), whereas the types of user testing are qualitative measures. On the other hand, we are users ourselves and we also know what is wrong already (see e.g. the "Getting real" approach advocated by the collaboration geniuses of 37signals). But I don't want to shy away from user testing. But how to organize it, whom to test on (who is our audience), and what do we want the user to know the user might not have thought of? Important questions as well. The news section for example, can be usable, but I wonder how important it is. What is the reason for having a news section. Because you want a lively homepage. Why do we need to link to what others write? Why not use this space differently, and introduce a new clipart set instead to the audience? A news ticker (the Apple.com website for an example) doesn't consume too much space. But we should question whether even this is necessary. Before testing it is important to know these things. Only then can we evaluate whether we have resolved some of the issues we know of, and think are important, through usability testing. That is why I am advocating the User page requirements page: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Pages_Requirements g., Maarten --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
