Basie Blog

Yesterday Greg brought Ryan Feeley in our lab to give us some feedback on Basie’s and MarkUs’s user interface. Ryan, who hadn’t seen any of the two sites before, acted as an educated new user, critiqued some of the existing interfaces and provided suggestions on how to improve their usability. The thought process of a user experience (UX) feedback was invaluable so the notes I took might be of some use to future developers:

• The “Home” link is confusing because it takes you to the list of projects, whereas somebody would expect to be directed to the home page of the currently-selected project. Perhaps we should remove “Home”? Or maybe we can rename “Home” to “Projects”?
• It is confusing to be able to view tickets/wiki/source even when you are not logged in. (You cannot edit either of them without logging in, of course, but Eran is working on authentication and we are addressing this issue). At the very least, it would be helpful if we had a message like “Please log in to add/view wiki.”
• In the ticket filters section, the field Number sounds very vague. Is it ticket ID or issue #? In addition to that, what does the default “—–” in the drop boxes mean? We should probably replace it with something more specific, like “all” or “none” etc. Specifically, the field Owner can be used to replace the “My Tickets” button by adding “me” on the top of the owners list.
• In the same section, maybe we can change “Hide columns” to “Show columns” because it’s more positive
• “Events” can probably be renamed into “Activity Log” or “Events Log” to make their purpose clearer.
• In the event filters, we should be using datepickers instead of YYYY-MM-DD text fields.
• We should add some functionality that allows us to filter events by groups of contents, e.g. “Show me only events pertaining to wikis, tickets and mail”
• The title of each page, which is shown on a browser tab should show the currently-selected project’s name first and then any other info.
• We should have sortable columns for every table we display, and we should somehow keep the sorting when navigating by using the browser’s Back and Forward buttons.
• It’s a good idea to display a tooltip containing the first line of the subject of a mail/ticket/wiki etc. when the mouse hovers over a cell in the Subject column of the corresponding tables that show mail/tickets/wikis etc.
• Maybe we can use truncation for Date columns like the one used on the Mac? In the same vein, maybe we could use truncation of emails like the one in Google Groups.
• Our pagination widget should show how many pages there are in total. Ryan showed us what he thought was a cool option. Pagination is not necessary when there is onlu one page of items to be displayed.
• Our “Back to list” links should use chevrons. And our breadcrumbs are awesome! And we shouldn’t use conjunctions to start a sentence
• “Old Revisions” in wikis should be renamed to “Page History” or something similar.
• We should keep title case consistent across our buttons and any label that we display.
• The dashboard should not display negative axes. Blake joked that maybe it is useful for removing tickets and wikis.
• There is a font resizing issue in the dashboard; we probably forgot to use em’s like everywhere else.
• The ticket filter is generally too advanced, and we should simplify it.
• We should be aware that tools like Balsamiq, and iPlotz make designing UI interfaces easier.
• I left the most important direction for improvement last: we should have an instance of Basie populated with real data available at any time. Tickets named asdf and users named jgfjkhdf simply provide no room for useful UX feedback because they distract the user very easily.

That’s all for now, I hope this was helpful. Thanks for the feedback Ryan!