Usability comments and suggestions

[Wenya]

Started on: 2007-12-13
last update: 2007-12-13

Summary: Suggestions on how to improve MediaPortal usability.

Area: All of default setup, excluding some parts e.g. TV-functionality.

Description:

We have posted this by e-mail to a couple of people already because we wanted to get feedback from the developer team. We've heard nothing back, though, so we decided to try one last time - this time on this forum. We're really sorry if we're doing this the wrong and possibly annoying way.

We are a group of university students from Oulu, Finland. We got a project assignment to study some open source software's usability and report the results to software developers. We picked your program, MediaPortal, to study.

We first made some expert evaluations and then some usability tests. The attachment (MediaPortal.pdf) has a summary of what we found in usability tests. In these tests we didn't have a TV card available and only one test subject got to try a remote controller. Test subjects were young men who have used computers before and might consider using MediaPortal type program. We hope that the document is clear enough that you understand what we found. Please ask us if something is unclear.

If you're interested we can also send you more material: we can make a summary of our expert evaluations and maybe even do more usability tests. In any case we hope to hear from your reactions - whether it's "no thanks, not interested" or "great thing, we'll definetly use these results" or anything in between.


Hoping to get some comments,
usability project team:
Kimmo Kemppaala
Tanja Kangas
Jaakko Hyry
Ari Orajärvi
Kaisa Anttila
from University of Oulu, Department of Information Processing Science

[FlipGer]

Hi,

we are currently discussion the report internal. We just wanna collect our thoughts and findings before answering. The report is by all means welcome!

Flip.

[Wenya]

Oh, great! Then I'm sorry for posting this so many times. Our project had way too little time to wait for your answers - in fact we're having the ending meeting today - and we were getting worried when we heard nothing from you. Now we have at least something to write on our reports!




Kaisa

Edit - P.S. We still hope to hear your comments although our project is finished. Someone is supposed to continue where we left off.

[Darre]

The points you make are valid, but most of them are for the masses, I've experienced very little of the problems your test subjects had. However my girlfriend doesn't find MP as easy as MCE, but she likes it much better because of all the cool features, and all the nice skins. Testing MP out of the box isnt really fair as it gets so much better with a few key plugins/skins. But I understand why it has to be that way.

Anyways this should be great input for MP2.. most of the points made shouldn't be that hard to fix compared to the other great stuff the devs have done so far =)

[Wenya]

Hello!

I just wanted to ask if there's been any progress on collecting your thoughts and findings The new project has just started and we'd like to get some kind of conclusion to the last one - even if it is "we're not going to get any answer soon".

To Darre: we did indeed think that MediaPortal was meant for masses. Our test settings etc. were based on that assumption. If we made a mistake here then you probably need to think a little how to use our test results. On the other hand, I think it would be great if more people would be able to use your software as there has apparently been a lot of work put into it I hope the developers have some use for our report.


Kaisa