Terri,
thanks for taking the time to read my proposal and writing this email.
- Terri Oda <terri@zone12.com>:
What do you think? Should I comment the navigation structures? I've put a lot of thinking into it and that is, of course, not visible. I could comment and we'd have it easier to see where I think things should be put to.
I love how you've put all this thought into a better structure here. But no matter how much thought goes into it, someone's gonna have trouble finding stuff in a tree that big...
Yes. For a list owner this seems acceptable to me. Those are the ones who are willing to spend some time - they expect a certain level of complexity because they know the software is complex.
For a regular subscriber the interface should be as simple as possible (but not simplier or they will think we believe they are stupid ;).
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.
Reason is, I have planned search boxes for several other use cases e.g. finding a subscriber, a mail address etc.
I would rather not have two search boxes fanning out ambiguity and competing for user attention - unless we need to.
I do believe complexity is a deliberate decision.
We will start working on design May, 1st. Minor changes to pages and elements are possible. I'd like to avoid major changes after that - the effort of redoing design is immense.
Can we please please please do some user testing on the initial designs
before they get set in stone? Ideally, I think we'd want to do this at
Yes, very welcome.
the point where there's a clickthrough prototype. Then we could sit
some people down and ask them to do some tasks, and see how long it
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.
takes/where they go wrong. Plus we could get general impressions on
usability from the mailman-users list.
We should also manage the change actively e.g. provide a little website that explains why things have changed, where they have gone etc.
The goal would be to re-empower the people and give them the security back they have accquired using the old interface over the years.
p@rick
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