On Saturday 10 October 2009 23:53:52 Matthew Toseland wrote:
> On Thursday 08 October 2009 00:49:11 Cl?ment wrote:
> > Hello, I felt bored tonight, so I wrote this.
> >
> > This is just a beginning, but in order to have a good UI, we need to
> > adress those questions with all the attention they deserve. In
> > particular, the raison d'etre (why a new UI?) and the model of the user
> > (what is our target audience?).
>
> This is logical.
>
> > FREENET UI
> >
> > => Raison d'etre:
> >
> > "To allow the user to access all (or the more of) the services provided
> > by a Freenet node.
>
> Or the functionality that they will commonly want to use, with the rest
> being provided by third party tools etc?
>
Sure
> > Current limitations:
> > - A lot of users complain about Freenet being complicated to use
>
> Freenet is complicated, period. Many important things about Freenet are
> hard to safely simplify. :(
>
Well, we should find out which things are hard to simplify : are they essential
to use Freenet ?
> > - Some menus/sub-menus contain too many elements, when other contain too
> > few
>
> True, but please consider simple mode, new users will not use advanced
> mode...
>
We may want to focus on simple mode at a start, but I think we shouldn't work
on advanced mode just because it's for advanced users and they can deal with
it. It should be comfortable to use for both.
> > - Some informations presented to the user are complicated, and make him
> > ask a lot of questions
>
> If you have any ideas on this, I'd be interested, but in a lot of cases it
> is unavoidable...
>
I don't have any ideas yet. That's just a remark. But I think that is an
important point we should keep in mind.
> > - Some informations presented to the user are related to the node's
> > internal logic
>
> True, should be avoided in simple mode in general.
>
> > - Feel free to complete
> >
> > Success criterion (measurables):
> > - Users complain far less about Freenet being complicated (Freenet loses
> > its image of a complicated software)
>
> Not possible, but some progress can surely be made.
>
If you start with "not possible", we won't go far :p Apart from that, as I
said above, we should find what users find complicated right now, to simplify
things as much as we can.
> > - Users are capable to accomplish all the action they want in a small
> > time (we can ask a user to do some action an measure the time it takes
> > for that (both in old and new UI), ...)
> > - Feel free to complete"
> >
> >
> > => Model of the user:
> >
> > General knowledge:
> > The user can read/write his own language and perhaps english. He knows
> > how to use a computer.
> >
> > Knowledge in the application domain:
> > Weak: the user only knows the basics : some general vocabulary, no
> > technical detail. Do not know any specific terms.
> >
> > Computer skills:
> > Basic +: the user knows how to use a computer and may have already used
> > some P2P softwares before. Mostly run windows and is used to basic
> > actions.
>
> Seems reasonable.
>
> > Feel free to complete
> >
> > => Activity modeling:
> >
> > Here we need to do some polls, ask people on irc, if possible watch them
> > using freenet. We could also refer to the state of the art: we're not the
> > only p2p application, and even
> > though freenet is different, I'm sure we could reuse some things.
> >
> > SO, we need questions to ask in order to know what peoples do on freenet,
> > and how they do it. If we can get some scenario from existing users (in
> > our target audience),
> > it would be also great.
>
> So we need more usability testing, we need to look at the UI of other apps,
> and we need to find out how people actually use Freenet?
>
Yep. The most important part (according to my (basic) course) is to have
people telling us how they work know with freenet, i.e. make them write
scenarii. A poll is surely a good thing too, since we may have a larger
audience. I'll try to write down some questions if we agree on the basics
here.
> > I stop here for now, since this point also depends on the two previous
> > ones.
> >
> > If you have any question, please ask :)
> >
> > Regards,
> >
> > Dieppe
> >
> > P.S. : I have to say that it's been a while since I didn't go to the
> > channel or saw message on frost (I'm waiting for Freetalk for that ;)),
> > so I may have a truncated view.
>
