stevencl's WebLog

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

Posted by stevencl | 5 Comments

Filed under: Usability, API Usability

Thursday, January 20, 2005 4:13 PM

Ideas for talks at upcoming conferences?

I was just in a meeting with the Visual Studio UX (user experience) team. Someone brought up the topic of upcoming developer conferences and whether or not folks from the UX team would be attending. Then someone suggested that we could even consider doing

Posted by stevencl | 5 Comments

Filed under: Usability

Wednesday, August 04, 2004 3:21 PM

Whyline

Brad Myers from CMU was here today giving a talk which included some details of the Whyline system, a debugger that allows programmers to ask questions about the behavior of their application in order to be able to figure out what the problem is (there's

Posted by stevencl | 1 Comments

Filed under: Usability

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

Posted by stevencl | 6 Comments

Filed under: Usability, API Usability

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

Posted by stevencl | 1 Comments

Filed under: Usability, API Usability

Tuesday, April 27, 2004 2:24 PM

Psychology of Programming Workshop

Another paper that caught my attention at the recent Psychology of Programming workshop was presented by Matt Jadud from the University of Kent. Matt's research focuses on understanding how novices learn to program and to develop teaching methodologies

Posted by stevencl | 6 Comments

Filed under: Usability

Friday, February 27, 2004 3:10 PM

Usability and prototypes

It's been a while since I last posted and the main reason for my silence has been that I've been busy preparing and running a usability study this week which involved the creation of an HTML prototype to mock up the UI of the product we were studying.

Posted by stevencl | 2 Comments

Filed under: Usability

Friday, January 30, 2004 9:20 AM

OK/Cancel

I just got forwarded this link to a pretty amusing and interesting usability site: http://www.ok-cancel.com/index.html

Posted by stevencl | 0 Comments

Filed under: Usability

Friday, November 14, 2003 11:49 AM

Sign up for a usability study

If you'd like to get the chance to participate in an API usability study and give us your feedback about Avalon, Indigo, WinFS or other APIs, sign up as a usability participant at http://www.microsoft.com/usability/ . We're running studies fairly regularly

Posted by stevencl | 10 Comments

Filed under: Usability

Monday, November 03, 2003 3:42 PM

Experts and non experts

I had an interesting conversation with a colleague of mine last week. We were discussing the extent to which full details of a technology or feature should be exposed to end-users. We were discussing this issue in the context of the IDE specifically,

Posted by stevencl | 10 Comments

Filed under: Usability, API Usability

Friday, October 24, 2003 5:32 PM

Usability at the PDC

Graeme Mott, a colleague of mine in the Visual Studio Usability group will be at the PDC next week. He's planning a few interesting activities: He'll be walking around the conference with a video camera giving attendees thirty seconds of 'air-time'

Posted by stevencl | 2 Comments

Filed under: Usability

Wednesday, October 15, 2003 1:09 PM