[TYPO3-hci] Surveys and known facts?

[Patrick Broens]

Hi Staffan,

+1

There was already a suggestion about this from Sebastian Erlhofer in 
June. I think the best way to get to know wat a newby/regular/expert 
user thinks about TYPO3 and its usability is having a survey. We can 
invent a lot of new functionality, but are the regular users waiting for 
such improvements? After all, almost everybody in this list is not a 
regular user.

The only question right now is if we can get enough regular and novice 
users to participate. That all depends on the promotion of the survey by 
the agencies who provide TYPO3 for their clients.

You can find the draft for the survey Sebastian suggested at 
http://wiki.typo3.org/index.php/Usability_Survey

To get a good impression it really needs to be updated with other 
questions then available right now.

Some things we have to take care about:
(1) The survey has to be multilingual, not only in English. A lot of 
regular users have setup their backend to their own language and don't 
know what you are talking about when using English terms only.
(2) Separate the questions according to the role and the experience 
users have. Don't show questions about Typoscript when the respondent is 
a newby editor.
(3) Use images to explain the questions and the answers provided.
(4) There are a lot of suggestions how we can improve the usability. 
Show them in the survey and ask what the respondents think of it. For 
instance the discussion pull-down menu / tabbed menu / separate windows 
on a desktop.

It will be quite some task to conduct a survey like this and I'm willing 
to cooperate in it, as I am the developer of pbsurvey :-))

Maybe it is a good idea to have this survey before the -not planned- 
meeting of the HCI group. The results can be very interesting for this 
meeting.

Patrick


Staffan Ericsson wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> After browsing through a selection of the posts in the news groups I
> find  a few interesting things.
> 
> 1. A lot of graphical design threads.
> 2. A lot of technical debates.
> 3. Much talk about the general GUI
> 
> 
> What I miss is the talk about the things I have found people having
> problems with and threads that present surveyed data of the usability
> issues.
> 
> 
> 
> Take for example all this strange TypoScript that exists through out
> TYPO3. There has been talk about a TS-editor function - isn't that a
> high priority area when it comes to ease of use and ease of remembering?
> 
> I can for sure have a minor hell adding a new extension to my setup.
> Some extensions have about 100 TS settings and the docs are note the
> most userfrindly place to start. I usually just grabs setup.txt and edit
> it my favorite editor to then paste it into the TS field of my choice.
> 
> And the use of TS config as description for
> * FE configuration
> * FE User configuration
> * BE configuration
> * BE User configuration
> 
> is just raving mad - how can it survived so long?
> 
> Where is the feedback on TS errors?
> 
> 
> Another interesting problem is the User Admin module that don't provide
> support to create users or groups. File/page mounts are probably most
> naturally to insert here also along with some access control features.
> 
> The file mount dialog does not have the object browser support which
> should reduce error rates and put "knowledge in the world".
> 
> The access module is nice - but why not more access info in the page-tree?
> 
> 
> 
> A survey that goes through every standard module and the most popular
> extensions should be conducted to deiced which problems that really
> exists. Some things might not be high priority to change but less "cool"
> parts might be more important to improve to remove the worst bumps.
> 
> A chain is not stronger as it weakest link. TYPO3 needs to kill of those
> worst points to become stronger. Improve the good enough parts does not
> improve the system as much as the worst parts.
> 
> 
> .staffan
>