Patrick Ben Koetter wrote:
Can we add a search box for options? It might not be necessary on the
smaller pages, but the full admin/owner interface looks like it's still
going to be sufficiently busy that it could help.We can. But I, personally, would want to wait for usability test and see if we can do without it simply because it makes the interface more complex.
Well, here's some user data from a recent mailman-users post
http://www.mail-archive.com/mailman-users%40python.org/msg53494.html
This is a *common* way for people to find things in the current mailman admin interface, sadly. I've watched people do it and had people tell me in person that's how they find things too. Most people who maintain mailing lists do settings changes infrequently, and often under some time pressure. And they never have time to learn the menu hierarchy unless they maintain a lot of different types of lists. And often not even then. There's a lot of options there, and most people nowadays are used to the google method of finding things. ;)
I totally understand not wanting to add too much extra, but... my user observations thus far imply that this is a feature that would be used heavily.
The test scenario affects the outcome of the test. We need to standardize the test before we run it. I might be able to get some people from a usability lab we work with help us. Let me check that.
I'm an academic researcher professionally, so I'm well aware of issues in testing methodologies. But honestly? Don't get caught up in doing Perfect Science here. Even a quick, dirty, messy user study would give us a lot of information that could be useful. The current interface suffers badly from lack of user testing, and I'd hate for the same to be true of the new one.
If you need more help with user studies, I should be able get some help from the usability research lab here. I know one of the profs here expressed interest in mailman usability in the past, and we may be able to find people willing to work on the problem.
Terri