foaf-o-matic

The mis­sion: jazz up foaf-o-matic, an appli­ca­tion cre­ated and main­tained by a col­league of mine, within two and a half weeks.

Foaf-o-matic was meant to be pre­sented at the year-one-review meet­ing of the Okkam project (my cur­rent employ­ment). But to really make a good impres­sion, sev­eral usabil­ity and design issues needed to be corrected.

reveal­ing and orga­niz­ing issues

• a walk­through & think-aloud test with lab­o­ra­tory col­leagues has been performed
• 58 task have been extracted from the test results
• pri­or­i­ties have been set up: the urgency depended on the kind of prob­lem (see list below ) influ­enced by the num­ber of times this issues has been men­tioned by the testers

task pri­or­i­ties

• 5   user aborts or gets wrong con­clu­sion about sys­tem status
• 4   major issue, user is disturbed
• 3   issue, but not disturbing
• 2   minor issue
• 1   future request

task cat­e­gories

• logic
  behav­ior dif­fered from expectation
• labels
  incom­pre­hen­si­ble cap­tions used
• lay­out
  struc­tural improve­ments due to wrong place­ment of components
• sim­plify
  unnec­es­sary func­tion­al­ity, or very spe­cific options not hid­den in menus
• design
  use of unnec­es­sary, dis­turb­ing or mis­lead­ing design elements
• func­tion
  miss­ing or inap­pro­pri­ate func­tion­al­ity, e.g. back but­ton problem
• feed­back
  miss­ing or inap­pro­pri­ate (too strong or too weak) feedback
• bug
  unhan­dled excep­tions in the application

As the time period was very much lim­ited and one week has been used to drive the tests, eval­u­ate and struc­ture the results and to define solu­tions, the tasks needed to be ranked, as we could not expect to solve all of them within one week.

errors and solutions

Fol­low­ing Nielsen’s heuristics.

Vis­i­bil­ity of sys­tem status

The busy indi­ca­tor is totally lost and invis­i­ble, it is hid­den in the upper right cor­ner, between four dark cir­cles and the “7”.
Sur­round­ing images are too strong, miss­ing space, indi­ca­tor too small and too light colored.

See the solu­tion in the final screenshot.

Match between sys­tem and the real world

Nerdish lan­guage, “FOAF it now” unrec­og­niz­able as link, at first trail, I could not start the appli­ca­tion due to this issue. Addi­tion­ally there is a menu above with­out func­tion in this appli­ca­tion state and the user can not dis­able this intro screen.

Finally “FOAF” and “ENS” got an small expla­na­tion, the user can dis­able this screen with a check­box at the bot­tom and he or she eas­ily finds the link to start.

An illog­i­cal menu struc­ture labeled with system-oriented terms. To find options about ones pro­file, the user needed to choose “FOAF” -> “Pri­mary per­son” -> … despite the fact, that the accord­ing GUI sec­tion one the left, is titled “Me”.

“Gen­er­ate FOAF” has been moved to “File”, as it cre­ates file out­put. “Pri­mary per­son” was renamed “Me” and the sub­menus became main menu items, as they are main ele­ments of the GUI.

Error pre­ven­tion

The label “Pic­ture” did not com­mu­ni­cate, that an URL is required here. Users always ran into errors here. Same for all “…Web­Page” fields, as is nec­es­sary to enter “http://” in the begin­ning, as the field con­tent is checked to be a valid URI.

By edit­ing labels and pre-filling form fields, those prob­lems could be solved already.

Aes­thetic and min­i­mal­ist design

The messy look of the old ver­sion could be improved by hid­ing less impor­tant infor­ma­tion. In this case, the notice at the bot­tom of the dia­log has been hid­den behind the ques­tion mark sym­bol. As soon as the user moves the mouse pointer upon, a hint appears.

Help users rec­og­nize, diag­nose, and recover from errors

Improved ver­sion indi­cates errors in a much more vis­i­ble way and addi­tion­ally gives a short explan­tion of the prob­lem in sim­pler lan­guage, i.e. “invalid address” instead of “invalid URI”. For now, the user is asked to check again, in a fol­low up ver­sion the sug­ges­tion should be prob­lem spe­cific, in this case for exam­ple an exam­ple of a valid URL could be shown.

Re-engineered inter­face at a glance

Re-engineered, cleaned up version.

About 60 issues have been found dur­ing the eval­u­a­tion, 37 issues reached an accept­able state, 12 com­plete sat­is­fac­tion within just 10 days of work. The major­ity of prob­lems have sim­ply been over­looked by the devel­oper in the past, or have not been rec­og­nized as prob­lems at all.