Usability Home
This page is intended to be a repository for ideas on the 2009 Season of Usability User Research Project.
Caveat: this is an area for brainstorming thoughts and suggestions on the project and developing ideas on the kinds of data that would be useful to know about users; it is not intended to be a list of things that will be implemented.
General thoughts and suggestions for project
- From IRC discussion 06/09:
- valiant: we could experiment with integrating such survey(s) in gallery itself, so that we make it really easy to report feedback if a user is frustrated with the product in some way
- Alcapond: good idea but not in the focus of this SoU project. Should be kept in mind for further projects!
- Perhaps one survey is not the right solution. Try to run couple of surveys in order to further specify the questions asked and to avoid too many free questions in final survey.
Specific question areas or data that would help Gallery
- User demographics
- Motivations for using Gallery
- Common Tasks/Use Cases
- Practical information for design work
- How many users does the average gallery have?
- What photo management software does the user know or use?
- From IRC discussion 06/09:
- valiant: i'd be really interested in the pain points. e.g. if gallery is really awful for task X, then we should know about it. and we need to prioritize such issues
- jhilden: one thing of the top of my head would be to find out more about the constellations that Gallery is used in. e.g. who sets up the gallery, who uses it?, how are permissions handled?
- jhilden: it would also be good to know what other software our users are familiar with so that we can assume which UI metaphors they already know. that would be mainly about other photo software
- What tasks do users carry out with Gallery vs. with other software?
- Do you use Gallery only to publish your pictures, or do you also use it for organizing, simple editing, adding metadata? e.g. a user might do all of her editing/organizing with a program like Adobe Lightroom and then only upload those photos to Gallery that they want to show to the world.
- Find out for which work-flows resp. use-cases gallery and other products are being used. Try to understand the strenghts of gallery in contrast to other solutions. Try to find out in which areas gallery could improve in order to get more users
Strategies to reach target groups/users to participate in survey
- Send out email on gallery -devel mailing list
- Put it in the latest news on gallery website; this will also show in admin menu in Gallery
- Feature the survey somewhere else in the application, like the dashboard
- Working with admins to reach their end-users (comment jhilden: I'm not sure you will be able to find any such big Gallery installations)
- Reach potential Gallery users:
- Through social media (Facebook groups)
- Photo group listservs
- Photography professional groups or student groups
- Photography conferences, workshops, events
- Forums for "competing" products like Coppermine, Zenphoto
- Set-up a mailing list, where participants of the survey can register for participation in further surveys
