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2. Because our participants were not regular windows users, we did not evaluate tasks associated with
interaction with the windows desktop, etc.. We also offered instruction for using PC window
controls for those participants with the least exposure to windows.
3. Identifying tasks for our TaskTimer study was, by the nature of this experiment, relatively
arbitrary compared to our normal procedure. Lacking any contextual information provided by a
dedicated human interface designer and/or product marketing personnel, we opted to use the task
analysis for one of our own calendar/name database software projects as the basis for identifying
tasks.
While our tasks in no way reflect the sum of the possible uses of TaskTimer, the tasks do represent
a sub-set of the typical tasks associated with using calendar and names database solutions in a
networked/enterprise environment.
4. The process of this study completely conflicted with the methodology promoted within our
organization. Typically, members across the product team are involved throughout the process of
user evaluations. Their involvement in our studies (including such things as: providing information
which feeds the study design, observing users, and participating in a post-study debriefing session)
promotes an inter-disciplinary process which we strongly advocate. This process is not facilitated
by isolated usability engineers evaluating products and delivering a stand alone report.
Lacking dialog with engineers, designers and marketing personnel, we felt that the TT study was
being conducted in a vacuum. We had a very narrow understanding of the scope of TT in terms of
implementation parameters, design goals, and target user requirements. This affected our ability to
adequately focus our evaluation of the product.
5. Because the scope of TT is so vast, we had extreme difficulty keeping our investigation narrow and
focused on the issues we set out to investigate. Clearly we bit off more than we anticipated and
collected more feedback than we can address with the time we’ve allocated for conducting this
study. In particular:
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It was very difficult to isolate calendar tasks from task management when participants actually
tried to complete the tasks.
We were too unfamiliar with the product and were often just as surprised as the participants at
some behavior. Having a member of the development team walk us through product
features/intricacies would have prevented this.
We clearly understood that some of the design decisions are directly addressing task
management requirements, although they might have negative effects on simple calendar tasks.
How should we address this?
We ran out of time to address all the issues related to the tasks we set out to investigate. This
made it difficult to place priority on the issues we did identify, so we refrained.
6. Because we didn’t have a communication channel with the team UI designers, we did not know
how to refer to all the graphical elements. We made up our own names. Please bear with them!