Hi Folks,

Matthew Eernisse and I had a busy Thursday-Sunday last week.  We had a really interesting usability testing
session at Oracle, then spent Friday and the weekend doing a sprint with people who specialize in usability.

Oracle
------

Daniel Schwartz at Oracle not only organized the weekend's sprint, he also convinced Oracle to donate half
a dozen engineer's time to doing usability testing for Chandler.  Katie joined us for Thursday and she gave
a Chandler talk to a dozen people at Oracle over lunch.

After lunch, we tested the Web UI, observing two test subjects (friends) run through a sample script.  We
should have videos of that soon.

A few takeaways:
- Neither person seemed to have any difficulty with the concept of stamping, which was gratifying
- Both testers were repeatedly confused about what the active collection was, and wanted to be able to move
or copy items between collections

FLOSS sprint at Google
----------------------

Moderately detailed notes are at http://chandlerproject.org/Notes/FlossSprint2007


In brief, there were about 30 people at the event, focused on Firefox, Chandler, and the website
WiserEarth. Half a dozen folks (most of them were Oracle usability people) focused on Chandler.  When
directed to choose one usability area to focus on, we decided to go with overlays and collection selection
since that had been a major issue during the testing at Oracle.

Before we delved into overlays, everyone with a laptop installed Chandler Desktop and gave quick bug
reports (several people bumped into the Gutsy menu bug which crashes Chandler, and the minicalendar
isn't drawing/sizing appropriately on the Mac and Linux).

People did whiteboard mockups of different UIs for calendar selection and overlays, which can be seen
(unfortunately, without much explanation) at http://www.flossusability.org/wiki.pl?ChandlerUsability#nid5QQ


Matthew focused in on a few of these designs, and did a series of Javascript prototypes:

The current behavior: http://www.fleegix.org/demo/floss_usability_2007/proto_0.html

Alternate layout: http://www.fleegix.org/demo/floss_usability_2007/proto_1.html

   - Checkboxes on right, so they're less prominent
   - Disabled checkbox when collection is selected
   - Added "Active: Some collection" 
Another layout: http://www.fleegix.org/demo/floss_usability_2007/proto_2.html

   - Keep "Active: Some collection"
   - Use eye to display overlaid state
   - Distinguish between always overlaid (black eye) and overlaid-because-selected (eye with colored background)
   - Allow overlay to toggle even when the collection's selected 

All in all, there's a lot of interest from the usability community in helping open source projects that want
feedback.  Hopefully we can tap this community more!  To start with, I'd like to have the Oracle folks in for
lunch at 543 Howard to thank them for all their testing help, but perhaps there's more we could do?

Sincerely,
Jeffrey

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