[Mailman-Developers] Hyperkitty usability testing at SpinachCon (LibrePlanet 2014)

[Máirín Duffy]

Hi folks,

One of the events affiliated with LibrePlanet this past weekend was an 
event called 'SpinachCon' (so named because letting projects know about 
usability bugs is helpful, like pointing out spinach in a friend's 
teeth. :) ) My colleague Ryan Lerch and I hosted a Hyperkitty table at 
SpinachCon to get some Hyperkitty testing done - we had 8 test 
participants who worked through 6 tasks in the interface and then filled 
out a questionnaire about their experience.

Hyperkitty did really well in testing. It scored high marks on look and 
feel, and users had very positive things to say in the freeform fields 
on the questionnaire. The most prominent issue throughout the tests and 
across users was search; Aurélien has already been looking into search 
improvements, so I think we already knew this too :)

I've written a high-level blog post summary of the results (which also 
talks about the mechanics of the testing as well) here:

http://blog.linuxgrrl.com/2014/03/25/hyperkitty-at-the-0th-spinachcon

I also transcribed and collated the raw test data here, which includes 
tester demographics/background as well as the content of their 
questionnaires and the per-task notes they took as they completed the test:

https://fedorahosted.org/hyperkitty/wiki/SpinachConZero

Our Hyperkitty OPW intern Karen Tang was able to come out too, and she 
caught the last couple of hours of SpinachCon. She's been working on 
making Hyperkitty's UI responsive & mobile-friendly, and is interested 
in working on the same for Postorious now that her internship is over, 
so you might be hearing from her soon regarding that.

Deb Nicholson, who organized SpinachCon, mentioned that she's looking at 
doing another one in Boston in May, so I am planning to bring Hyperkitty 
(and potentially Postorious?) to that one as well!

~m