I'm sorry to say it, but Mailman's web interfaces are extremely daunting and confusing.
As someone who's spent time documenting them... yes! They're useable, and people can learn them, but I know I noticed things that simply don't make sense to a lot of users. We've fixed the ones that came up a lot for me, but I'm sure there's others that I simply don't *see* any more because I'm so used to it.
And we're only talking about the frontend (listinfo interface) here now, not even the backend (admin interface) for list owners. The backend is so incredibly complex and overwhelming that it has become a serious stumbling block for us in offering a service that people will actually use.
Oh yes! I'm partway through documenting our existing admin interface and it's... hard. I love the flexibility offered through mailman, but explaining it to people is horribly difficult, and that's a bad sign for useability.
My biggest problem with mailman's interfaces is that they're *really* designed to expose the underlying mechanics. If you know how Mailman works, they're relatively easy to use. I don't usually mind this for the admin interfaces because I work with list admins who actually are motivated to learn some about how the system works. But a lot of list members (and list admins, just not mine) don't know how it works (and shouldn't need to know), and things fall apart then. The biggest one is the seperate-logins-for-all-lists sort of stuff. Many user don't understand (or care) that this reflects our (now seemingly flawed) architecture, and telling them "that's just the way it was designed" is kinda lame when it's clearly not the way it should work.
Has anybody considered having a usability expert look at the Mailman interfaces and redesign them so they make more sense from a user's point of view?
This *is* a good idea, especially for mailman 3, where I think we'll be redesigning a lot of the interfaces. It's harder with 2.1 because *changing* stuff can cause as many usability problems as it solves, but as I said, we've tweaked a few things since I started documenting, and minor changes can make things a whole lot easier sometimes.
So, any usability experts around who are willing to volunteer some time?
Okay, I'll admit it: I actually have some formal training in usability, but I'd rather someone with more if there's anyone out there. (hellooo? If you don't want to admit it publicly, at least send me an email so I know who to ask?)
The gist of all usability studies is that the USERS are the one who should drive design of the interfaces. Not programmers, not usability experts, not managers of the users, not documenters of the interface. And darned if we don't all have users. :)
So no excuses here -- we *can* do at least some simple usability studies. Ask your users what they love/hate about the interface! Ask them what "stupid" mistakes they make -- if lots of people do the same thing, it's probably our fault and not theirs. If you've got physical access to your users, see if you can watch them do certain tasks and note what they do wrong, what takes a long time, etc. Most of us *are* users as well as developers/admins/etc. What do we find to be a pain in the neck? Heck, what do we get asked over and over again? (I used to have people ask me regularly "How do I unsubscribe" until we changed the button "Edit Options" to say "Unsubscribe or Edit Options") What bugs are reported related to the interface? (this includes bugs that aren't really bugs, but rather that the user couldn't find the right way to do things) What behaves in ways that users don't expect? What feature requests are made?
So, gathering usability data isn't impossible. It's not going to be the best data ever, because there are much more scientific ways to go about this, but it *is* valid data and can be useful to us.
I think going through and gathering this data would be *really* helpful and could lead to a much better interface. What would be the best way to gather this information? Should we set up some pages in the wiki and make sure they're well known to users as a place to report this sort of thing? The only problem with wikis is that people will see that something's been reported and not bother to duplicate, whereas we will want to know how *many* people are bothered by things. Perhaps something with some quick voting-style "this bugs me too" option? How can we make it easy for people to report usability concerns?
Any thoughts on how to do this? I'm willing to do a bit of coordination here to make sure this happens if people think we'll actually be able to use the information to make things better.
Terri
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