[Mailman-Developers] mailman 3: webinterface: prototype (PDF)

[Terri Oda]

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