Subject: usability labs (was Re: definitions -- *DI window management)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Sun Aug 19 2001 - 23:26:18 CDT
At 09:05 PM 8/19/01 +0000, David Chart wrote:
>Incidentally, did Netscape and IE run usability labs to test their
>interfaces? I know a bit about how bad procedures get engrained by
>inertia, and given that this is a fairly minor point (in general, I like
>MSDI. Really) it might just be that way because Joe Random Programmer
>decided to do it that way. And then MSFT copied Netscape. This is a
>genuine question, because I suspect Paul knows the answer.
I'm not sure about Netscape. Early on, I doubt it, because they started out
as the usual startup-on-a-mission who coded like mad, making the lives of
every other browser team miserable. (For a sense of what those early days
were like, ask any Mozilla old timer about the
phrase "monkey testing" -- especially if you want to horrify an SEI fan.)
Later on, that organization got pretty big, so they may well have had the
resources to do more formal testing. If you really want to know, I suspect
there's a relevant newsgroup over at mozilla.org where they'd know.
The IE folks I knew valued any time they got to spend in the usability labs
very highly -- I got the sense that lab time was considered a precious
resource, and there was a lot of competition among developers for timeslots
to test their features.
However, I have no idea whether either team formally tested the feature in
question. I'm sure any flagrant flaws in the UI would have generated a ton
of tech support data, though. With userbases of over a hundred million,
it's unlikely that any nit goes unpicked.
Paul
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