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Thursday, May 05, 2005 3:53 PM

API usability evaluation

Christopher Oezbek is keeping notes about an API usability evaluation he is doing using the cognitive dimensions.
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Thursday, May 05, 2005 11:31 AM

HOWTO: Run an API usability study

With the task list in place and participants recruited, it's time to run the study. My experience has been that running an API usability study is really no different from running any other type of study. Here's a description of what I do. The day before
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Tuesday, March 29, 2005 12:26 PM

HOWTO: Design and run an API usability study

A few people have asked me about how I design and run API usability studies. I'm running an Indigo study this week so I thought I would describe the steps that went into setting this study up. The study is a follow up to the Indigo study we ran in October
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Thursday, February 17, 2005 4:30 PM

API usability talk available on MSDN from tomorrow

The API usability portion of the Designing .NET Class Libraries class will be available from tomorrow. Apologies in advance if my Scottish accent makes it difficult to understand me! Let me know if there is anything that I need to translate...
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Friday, January 28, 2005 9:20 AM

Feedback on Avalon CTP?

If you've downloaded and played around with the Avalon CTP release would you be willing to share some of your feedback? I'd love to hear what you think of the usability of the Avalon APIs.
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Friday, October 08, 2004 8:52 AM

Attributes and API usability (again!)

I've been running another usability study on an API that makes heavy use of attributes and have made similar observations to a previous study (see http://weblogs.asp.net/stevencl/archive/2004/05/12/130826.aspx#FeedBack ) This time we've been looking at
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Tuesday, August 24, 2004 8:39 AM

Parameter naming and the Google test

Brad has a post on choosing parameter names for overloaded methods which brings to mind a recent question on an internal mailing list about using acronyms for parameter names. In general, when determining whether or not it's reasonable to use an acronym
Posted by stevencl | 6 Comments
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Monday, August 16, 2004 12:26 PM

System.Net usability study

I'm running a study this week on the Beta 1 version of the System.Net namespace. In addition to the feedback I'll be collecting from participants, I thought it would be useful to capture any comments that anybody else might have on the usability of this
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Friday, July 30, 2004 2:23 PM

Virtual properties anyone?

As part of the WinFX review team, I regularly review APIs for usability issues. One thing that we as a team have been highlighting as a potential issue is the use of virtual properties. Consider the following code snippet: public class Class1 { private
Posted by stevencl | 9 Comments
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Wednesday, July 14, 2004 11:08 AM

VS automation samples

I've been asked for suggestions for a list of VS automation samples that would help solve tricky tasks that I've observed users working on during usability studies. Just wanted to check if anybody has such a list of samples that they would like us to
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Tuesday, July 06, 2004 10:00 AM

This scares me!

Aleksei Guzev was scared by my last post on readability vs writability. I think what might have scared Aleksei (feel free to correct me if I am wrong Aleksei) is the thought that the results of this study would be used to make a case for adding a Count
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Friday, July 02, 2004 3:52 PM

Readability vs Writability

Jay has a great post on readability vs writability. It's really important to take this into account when performing a usability review on an API. Don't just review the code that a developer has to write in order to accomplish a given task with an API.
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Monday, May 24, 2004 12:31 PM

Using the cognitive dimensions

Now that I've finished posting the series of articles on using the cognitive dimensions to evaluate API usability, I've finally gotten around to adding links to each of these articles (see the left hand nav bar at http://weblogs.asp.net/stevencl ). And,
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Monday, May 17, 2004 11:59 AM

Using the cognitive dimensions - domain correspondence

This is the last in the series I've been posting about how to use the cognitive dimensions framework to evaluate your own APIs. For each user goal that your API supports, describe how closely related the classes and methods exposed by the API are to the
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004 5:26 PM

Attributes and API usability revisited

I posted a query last week requesting feedback on the use of attributes in an API and their effect on the usability of that API (thanks for all the responses!). My query was driven by a study that I was running and that is now complete. I promised that
Posted by stevencl | 6 Comments
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