Hi folks,
I'd like to introduce you to two new contributors who are going to be helping us put the new Anaconda UI through some usability tests:
- Meet Stephanie (cc'ed), who is my UX intern through the Outreach Program for Women [1] for the next few months. She is a computer science & engineering student from the University of California Merced. Her internship project involves helping us evaluate the usability of the new Anaconda UI.
- Meet Filip (also cc'ed), who is a student working on a diploma thesis in usability testing & tooling. He is friends with Jaroslav Reznik and is going to be helping us with the usability testing plan, and he is also going to be helping us on the ground running some tests at DevConf.cz.
One important part of a usability testing plan is giving the users who will be running the tests a brief survey to understand their background and technical experience with respect to the software being tested. Having this information about the testers will help us better interpret the test results.
Stephanie has put together an initial cut of the survey we'll be handing to users before they take the Anaconda usability test. We're looking for some feedback on the survey itself - we don't need your answers to the survey, just comments on the structure / content of the survey itself. :) The specific kind of feedback we are looking for is as follows:
- Did we miss any key technologies in the lists of questions to ask?
- Is any of the wording inaccurate or technically incorrect?
- Are there key technical experience or demogrpahic questions that would affect a user's experience through the interface that we should be asking and aren't here?
I've pasted the latest survey draft below - please let us know your thoughts!
Thanks, ~m
[1] https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
SURVEY DRAFT ============
1) Please circle which of the following age ranges applies to you:
< 18 18-25 25-30 31-35 36-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 70+
2) How often do you use computers and for what reasons? (circle all that apply)
I don't use computers often. I use computers for work. I use computers at home. I know how to program.
3) How much experience do you have with any system administration?
Novice Moderate Advanced
4) Do you have experience installing any Operating Systems? Which ones?
Fedora Red Hat Enterprise Linux Other Linux ________ Apple OS X Windows 7 Windows XP Other Microsoft Windows ________ Other ________
5) Do you have experience installing any Virtual Machines? Which ones?
QEMU/KVM Xen Microsoft Hyper-V Parallels Virtual PC VMware Other ________
6) What different file systems are you familiar with? (circle all that apply)
ext2 / ext3 / ext4 btrfs VFAT NTFS XFS HFS / HFS+ Other ____________
7) Have you used any of the following networked file systems?
NFS NFSV4 SMB/CIFS Ceph Gluster Lustre
8) Do you have experience with advanced storage technologies?
a) If so, which kinds? (circle all that apply)
iSCSI Fibre Channel Multi-path Storage FCoE IBM ZFCP/DASD Firmware RAID Other ________
b) If so, do you have a preferred storage vendor? EMC Dell NetApp IBM Other ________
9) How much experience do you have with Logical Volume Management (LVM)? (circle one)
I've used it before as an automatically-selected / default storage option I've customized it manually before I've resized LVs before I've managed LVM storage across multiple machines
10) Do you prefer to configure software RAID? Yes No
If so, please specify:
RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 4 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID 0+1 RAID 1+0
11) If you customize your storage configuration when installing Linux, how many disks, what kind of layout, and what technologies do you most often use? (Please draw a diagram of how you would set this up)
12) Do you have any other comments about file and storage technologies that you want to share?
On 01/04/2013 04:16 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi folks,
I'd like to introduce you to two new contributors who are going to be helping us put the new Anaconda UI through some usability tests:
- Meet Stephanie (cc'ed), who is my UX intern through the Outreach
Program for Women [1] for the next few months. She is a computer science & engineering student from the University of California Merced. Her internship project involves helping us evaluate the usability of the new Anaconda UI.
- Meet Filip (also cc'ed), who is a student working on a diploma thesis
in usability testing & tooling. He is friends with Jaroslav Reznik and is going to be helping us with the usability testing plan, and he is also going to be helping us on the ground running some tests at DevConf.cz.
One important part of a usability testing plan is giving the users who will be running the tests a brief survey to understand their background and technical experience with respect to the software being tested. Having this information about the testers will help us better interpret the test results.
Stephanie has put together an initial cut of the survey we'll be handing to users before they take the Anaconda usability test. We're looking for some feedback on the survey itself - we don't need your answers to the survey, just comments on the structure / content of the survey itself. :) The specific kind of feedback we are looking for is as follows:
Did we miss any key technologies in the lists of questions to ask?
Is any of the wording inaccurate or technically incorrect?
Are there key technical experience or demogrpahic questions that would
affect a user's experience through the interface that we should be asking and aren't here?
I've pasted the latest survey draft below - please let us know your thoughts!
Would it be good to have the project sponsor some entity like the NNG [1] to review the installer work on their proposed solution to the issue they find after all they are expert at this?
JBG
On Fri 04 Jan 2013 12:20:07 PM EST, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
Would it be good to have the project sponsor some entity like the NNG [1] to review the installer work on their proposed solution to the issue they find after all they are expert at this?
Why would we waste the budget? I have training (HCI Masters degree) and experience leading such studies and am fully comfortable leading the effort with our paid intern (who has completed an NNG group seminar / training class) and volunteers.
Bringing in a third party would also necessarily push out the timeline considerably. Nielsen himself makes the argument in Usability Engineering that it's much more cost-effective to run your own small-scale usability test (he calls this "discount usability engineering.")
Is there anything about our methodology that we've described thus far that concerns you that's led you to make this suggestion that we could talk about? If you have specific questions about how we're going about doing this that would help your confidence here, I'm happy to answer them.
~m
On 01/04/2013 05:36 PM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On Fri 04 Jan 2013 12:20:07 PM EST, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
Would it be good to have the project sponsor some entity like the NNG [1] to review the installer work on their proposed solution to the issue they find after all they are expert at this?
Why would we waste the budget?
If you would call that a waste
I have training (HCI Masters degree) and experience leading such studies and am fully comfortable leading the effort with our paid intern (who has completed an NNG group seminar / training class) and volunteers.
Bringing in a third party would also necessarily push out the timeline considerably. Nielsen himself makes the argument in Usability Engineering that it's much more cost-effective to run your own small-scale usability test (he calls this "discount usability engineering.")
Is there anything about our methodology that we've described thus far that concerns you that's led you to make this suggestion that we could talk about? If you have specific questions about how we're going about doing this that would help your confidence here, I'm happy to answer them.
Other than us ( as in everyone in the community ) being to close to the project to arguably get a completely "neutral" criticism on the overall design then there is nothing that concerns me.
We ( as in everyone in the community ) inadvertently may affect the outcome of such study hence the proposal to get a completely neutral third party to conduct an research.
Having an third party conduct an research would give you/us also something to compare the findings from your/our research to theirs.
It was just an idea feel free to dismiss it...
JBG
On 01/04/2013 12:54 PM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
Why would we waste the budget?
If you would call that a waste
For a similar amount of money I think we could probably employ another engineer or two to help improve the UI instead. :) I do think it's a waste if we already have the resources to do it ourselves at little to no cost. You know, why buy a huge mansion with a bat cave to sleep for a night when you would do just fine to get a small hotel room.
Other than us ( as in everyone in the community ) being to close to the project to arguably get a completely "neutral" criticism on the overall design then there is nothing that concerns me.
We ( as in everyone in the community ) inadvertently may affect the outcome of such study hence the proposal to get a completely neutral third party to conduct an research.
I totally understand the third party concern. E.g., you don't want an engineer to QA the code that she wrote herself, etc. In fairness, neither Filip nor Stephanie were involved in the design of the new UI at all and both are new to contributing to Anaconda and at least in Stephanie's case, Fedora. While there will be some Red Hatters helping administer the test in Brno, none of the Anaconda developers will be involved in test administration.
I am also hoping we can do a run of the test in Boston as well, so we would have more data and could compare to the Brno results. Similarly, I would not be running that test since I'm not a neutral party at all, and I think likely my colleague Ryan Lerch who has experience running a similar sort of usability test would be running that.
Having an third party conduct an research would give you/us also something to compare the findings from your/our research to theirs.
It was just an idea feel free to dismiss it...
Fair enough, thanks for the idea.
~m
On 01/04/2013 09:16 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi folks,
I'd like to introduce you to two new contributors who are going to be helping us put the new Anaconda UI through some usability tests:
- Meet Stephanie (cc'ed), who is my UX intern through the Outreach
Program for Women [1] for the next few months. She is a computer science & engineering student from the University of California Merced. Her internship project involves helping us evaluate the usability of the new Anaconda UI.
- Meet Filip (also cc'ed), who is a student working on a diploma thesis
in usability testing & tooling. He is friends with Jaroslav Reznik and is going to be helping us with the usability testing plan, and he is also going to be helping us on the ground running some tests at DevConf.cz.
One important part of a usability testing plan is giving the users who will be running the tests a brief survey to understand their background and technical experience with respect to the software being tested. Having this information about the testers will help us better interpret the test results.
Stephanie has put together an initial cut of the survey we'll be handing to users before they take the Anaconda usability test. We're looking for some feedback on the survey itself - we don't need your answers to the survey, just comments on the structure / content of the survey itself. :) The specific kind of feedback we are looking for is as follows:
Did we miss any key technologies in the lists of questions to ask?
Is any of the wording inaccurate or technically incorrect?
Are there key technical experience or demogrpahic questions that would
affect a user's experience through the interface that we should be asking and aren't here?
I've pasted the latest survey draft below - please let us know your thoughts!
Thanks, ~m
[1] https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
SURVEY DRAFT
- Please circle which of the following age ranges applies to you:
< 18 18-25 25-30 31-35 36-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 70+
- How often do you use computers and for what reasons? (circle all that
apply)
I don't use computers often. I use computers for work. I use computers at home. I know how to program.
- How much experience do you have with any system administration?
Novice Moderate Advanced
- Do you have experience installing any Operating Systems? Which ones?
Fedora Red Hat Enterprise Linux Other Linux ________ Apple OS X Windows 7 Windows XP Other Microsoft Windows ________ Other ________
For questions 5 and beyond - if the users are indicating that they are a novice, they may not actually be familiar with the terms below. Even though you have things like "circle all that apply" it might be useful to have an answer along the lines of "no experience" or "not familiar with any", etc. - makes for less questioning as to whether or not they understood the question, got bored and didn't finish, etc. :) And in some cases can avoid someone just circling "something" because they felt like they were supposed to answer all the questions, which leads to random, wacky data. (Question 9 is a good example here.) Particularly with in-person type surveys done in groups - a lot of times nobody wants to be the person to raise their hand and say "do I circle something if I don't know what it is" because of how they might be perceived.
- Do you have experience installing any Virtual Machines? Which ones?
QEMU/KVM Xen Microsoft Hyper-V Parallels Virtual PC VMware Other ________
- What different file systems are you familiar with? (circle all that
apply)
ext2 / ext3 / ext4 btrfs VFAT NTFS XFS HFS / HFS+ Other ____________
- Have you used any of the following networked file systems?
NFS NFSV4 SMB/CIFS Ceph Gluster Lustre
- Do you have experience with advanced storage technologies?
a) If so, which kinds? (circle all that apply)
"If 'yes,'" tends to be more clear/precise than "if so"
iSCSI Fibre Channel Multi-path Storage FCoE IBM ZFCP/DASD Firmware RAID Other ________
b) If so, do you have a preferred storage vendor? EMC Dell NetApp IBM Other ________
- How much experience do you have with Logical Volume Management (LVM)?
(circle one)
I've used it before as an automatically-selected / default storage option I've customized it manually before I've resized LVs before I've managed LVM storage across multiple machines
- Do you prefer to configure software RAID?
Yes No
If so, please specify:
RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 4 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID 0+1 RAID 1+0
- If you customize your storage configuration when installing Linux,
how many disks, what kind of layout, and what technologies do you most often use? (Please draw a diagram of how you would set this up)
- Do you have any other comments about file and storage technologies
that you want to share?
Other thoughts: Since it looks like this is happening at devconf.cz - if it is not being translated, it might be worthwhile to find out if english is a primary/secondary/etc. language as a demographics-type question.
It might also be useful to ask if they are willing to answer follow-up questions at a later date, and obtain a method for doing so, just in case. :)
Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
On 01/04/2013 12:56 PM, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
For questions 5 and beyond - if the users are indicating that they are a novice, they may not actually be familiar with the terms below. Even though you have things like "circle all that apply" it might be useful to have an answer along the lines of "no experience" or "not familiar with any", etc. - makes for less questioning as to whether or not they understood the question, got bored and didn't finish, etc. :)
This is a great point. Maybe we can push all of the technical stuff solidly to the very bottom, and have a thing that says, "If no, you've completed this survey, thanks!" Something like that? Maybe chunk it into two parts, one higher up for sys-admin level usage, and another one further down for advanced storage tech so a sys=admin who isn't as experienced with advanced storage can just skip that section.
And in some cases can avoid someone just circling "something" because they felt like they were supposed to answer all the questions, which leads to random, wacky data. (Question 9 is a good example here.) Particularly with in-person type surveys done in groups - a lot of times nobody wants to be the person to raise their hand and say "do I circle something if I don't know what it is" because of how they might be perceived.
I think we also might want to have a preface on the top of the survey that says something like, "We're trying to gauge your familiarity and experience with some of the technologies that are possible to work with in this software. This is just to help us interpret the results of your test, and is not any kind of intelligence test or quiz. Please don't feel uncomfortable if you're not familiar with what a question is asking, and feel free to skip any questions you're not comfortable with."
Other thoughts: Since it looks like this is happening at devconf.cz - if it is not being translated, it might be worthwhile to find out if english is a primary/secondary/etc. language as a demographics-type question.
Filip has offered to translate our testing materials for us for use at devconf.cz. I am hoping to run the test in Boston as well.
It might also be useful to ask if they are willing to answer follow-up questions at a later date, and obtain a method for doing so, just in case. :)
Great idea!
Thanks Robyn, this is exactly the type of feedback we're looking for. :)
~m
On Fri, Jan 04, 2013 at 11:16:42AM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi folks,
- Are there key technical experience or demogrpahic questions that would
affect a user's experience through the interface that we should be asking and aren't here?
I'd add a question about dual booting -- do they, and what other os/distribution do they dual boot with. Also their preferred language+keyboard layout might be useful, in light of some of the recent conversation on the list.
On Jan 4, 2013, at 9:16 AM, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
- Did we miss any key technologies in the lists of questions to ask?
Multiboot question: How many, and which, other OS do they natively boot (not VM) on their hardware. Single disk or multi-disk?
Since new anaconda, and GRUB2 can do this, I'm curious how many respondents find useful, and/or know that they now can:
Boot md RAID 0, 1, 4, 5, 6 with /boot contained in the array. i.e. GRUB can assemble the array.
Directly boot file systems other than ext[234], e.g. XFS and Btrfs, i.e. GRUB can navigate /boot on those file systems.
Other questions to ask:
Familiarity with, value of: snapshots. Familarity with, value of: data checksumming; alternatively, Familiarity with, concern for storage related silent data corruption. Familiarity with, value of: array scrubbing (find and fix file errors online) Familiarity with, value of: storage pooling (using space on multiple drives as if it were one device)
- What different file systems are you familiar with? (circle all that
apply)
ext2 / ext3 / ext4 btrfs VFAT NTFS XFS HFS / HFS+ Other ____________
A minor point, but HFS can be deleted and leave just HFS+. HFS is beyond ancient. Even on OS X it's read-only and hasn't been possible to create an HFS volume in years.
And perhaps add ZFS.
- Have you used any of the following networked file systems?
NFS NFSV4 SMB/CIFS Ceph Gluster Lustre
Suggest adding AFP to be consistent with offering HFS+ in 6, admittedly obscure. WebDAV?
- How much experience do you have with Logical Volume Management (LVM)?
(circle one)
I've used it before as an automatically-selected / default storage option I've customized it manually before I've resized LVs before I've managed LVM storage across multiple machines
Suggest deleting "before" in all cases, superfluous.
- Do you prefer to configure software RAID?
Yes No
If so, please specify:
RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 4 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID 0+1 RAID 1+0
I think the question needs to be differently phrased, I'm not sure what's meant by prefer, but based on the please specify list I think the question is "Do you use software RAID?" and then "Specify all that apply". Or even more granular might be "Please specify frequency of usage" and come up with some simple scale: blank=never 1=seldom 2=sometimes 3=often.
Also, RAID 10 is the same as RAID 1+0. I think the two lines after RAID 6 should be: RAID 10 RAID 0+1
And, in the realm of advanced storage, but maybe not in an installer context, would be these nested RAID levels: RAID 50 RAID 51 RAID 60 Other ____
- If you customize your storage configuration when installing Linux,
how many disks, what kind of layout, and what technologies do you most often use? (Please draw a diagram of how you would set this up)
I'd make the diagram optional, unless you'd rather have some responses go blank on this: (Please feel free to draw a diagram of how you would set this up).
Chris Murphy
On Fri, 04 Jan 2013 11:16:42 -0500 Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
<snip>
I added a few comments in line - apologies if I've misunderstood the purpose behind some of the questions or the target audience.
Tim
- Do you have experience installing any Virtual Machines? Which ones?
This is a nitpick, but I wonder if that would be better phrased as "installing to" instead of "installing any"?
QEMU/KVM Xen Microsoft Hyper-V Parallels Virtual PC VMware Other ________
Based mostly on the comments I've seen in #fedora-qa and other conversations I've had with people outside of Fedora, I suspect that VirtualBox is a bit more common than some of the hypervisors listed here. I didn't even know that Virtual PC was still used much.
I don't know if this is useful input but when I've given presentations that touch on virtualization in the past, most people I've interacted with had no idea what QEMU or KVM was. It seemed that far more people were aware of vmware, virtualbox and xen but that might be just the people I end up interacting with.
- What different file systems are you familiar with? (circle all that
apply)
ext2 / ext3 / ext4 btrfs VFAT NTFS XFS HFS / HFS+ Other ____________
I wonder if it would be wise to include the OS with those filesystems. I suspect that there are many users who aren't aware that ext is a common fs for linux, NTFS is the current fs for windows and HFS+ is the default for OS X.
I'm not sure that I understand how this relates to usability outside of which OSs are commonly dual-booted with Fedora and how much interest there is in btrfs. I could be missing something but if that is the target of this question, might it be better to ask that ("what OSs have you dual-booted Fedora with") directly?
- Have you used any of the following networked file systems?
NFS NFSV4 SMB/CIFS Ceph Gluster Lustre
Similar to the fs question #6, I imagine that adding a comment on how SMB/CIFS ~= windows share might yield more complete data
- Do you have experience with advanced storage technologies?
a) If so, which kinds? (circle all that apply)
iSCSI Fibre Channel Multi-path Storage FCoE IBM ZFCP/DASD Firmware RAID Other ________
What is multi-path storage in this context? It seems to be a little out of place on this list (redundancy technique instead of protocol). Firmware RAID is also a bit ambiguous - are you interested in hardware raid that shows up as a disk to the OS or mdraid devices (intel raid, nvraid et. al)?
b) If so, do you have a preferred storage vendor? EMC Dell NetApp IBM Other ________
This is another one that I'm not really clear on - how does the storage vendor relate to OS installer usability? The only thing I can think of is to get an idea of which third-party drivers might be needed (would any of that be open source, though?), where to focus integration testing or if there was some sort of interface to the storage controller during installation but there can be quite a bit of variation between product lines of a single vendor.
With the exception of IBM storage (which I don't have any experience with or much knowledge of - this might apply to their storage products as well), I think all the rest of the vendors in that list produce products that speak standard protocols in the context of what we can have on the Fedora install media. AFAIK, multipath iSCSI setup should be the same on NetApp as on Dell or any other iSCSI target and the same goes for EMC or the other FC array manufacturers (again, within the context of what we can put on Fedora media).
- How much experience do you have with Logical Volume Management
(LVM)? (circle one)
I've used it before as an automatically-selected / default storage option I've customized it manually before I've resized LVs before I've managed LVM storage across multiple machines
- Do you prefer to configure software RAID?
Yes No
This might be a bit nitpicky, but I wonder if this question might be better phrased like "do you use software RAID" and potentially asking about preference over hardware solutions.
If so, please specify:
"If so, which RAID levels do you frequently use"?
RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 4 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID 0+1 RAID 1+0
- If you customize your storage configuration when installing Linux,
how many disks, what kind of layout, and what technologies do you most often use? (Please draw a diagram of how you would set this up)
- Do you have any other comments about file and storage technologies
that you want to share?
You might ask for gender, since you are asking for age. M/F/prefer not to say
Regards Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein 50 years in Information Technology and going strong. Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day, and tomorrow will be even better. SENT FROM MY OPEN SOURCE FEDORA LINUX SYSTEM.
mailto:lsatenstein@yahoo.com alternative: leslie.satenstein@itbms.biz www.itbms.biz www.eclipseguard.com
--- On Fri, 1/4/13, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
From: Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org Subject: Feedback on installer/storage survey for usability tests To: "Discussion of Development and Customization of the Red Hat Linux Installer" anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com Cc: =?ISO-8859-1?Q?Filip_?=@redhat.com, "Stephanie Manuel" stephaniemanuel16@gmail.com, "Kosík" 208245@mail.muni.cz Date: Friday, January 4, 2013, 11:16 AM
Hi folks,
I'd like to introduce you to two new contributors who are going to be helping us put the new Anaconda UI through some usability tests:
- Meet Stephanie (cc'ed), who is my UX intern through the Outreach Program for Women [1] for the next few months. She is a computer science & engineering student from the University of California Merced. Her internship project involves helping us evaluate the usability of the new Anaconda UI.
- Meet Filip (also cc'ed), who is a student working on a diploma thesis in usability testing & tooling. He is friends with Jaroslav Reznik and is going to be helping us with the usability testing plan, and he is also going to be helping us on the ground running some tests at DevConf.cz.
One important part of a usability testing plan is giving the users who will be running the tests a brief survey to understand their background and technical experience with respect to the software being tested. Having this information about the testers will help us better interpret the test results.
Stephanie has put together an initial cut of the survey we'll be handing to users before they take the Anaconda usability test. We're looking for some feedback on the survey itself - we don't need your answers to the survey, just comments on the structure / content of the survey itself. :) The specific kind of feedback we are looking for is as follows:
- Did we miss any key technologies in the lists of questions to ask?
- Is any of the wording inaccurate or technically incorrect?
- Are there key technical experience or demogrpahic questions that would affect a user's experience through the interface that we should be asking and aren't here?
I've pasted the latest survey draft below - please let us know your thoughts!
Thanks, ~m
[1] https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
SURVEY DRAFT ============
1) Please circle which of the following age ranges applies to you:
< 18 18-25 25-30 31-35 36-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 70+
2) How often do you use computers and for what reasons? (circle all that apply)
I don't use computers often. I use computers for work. I use computers at home. I know how to program.
3) How much experience do you have with any system administration?
Novice Moderate Advanced
4) Do you have experience installing any Operating Systems? Which ones?
Fedora Red Hat Enterprise Linux Other Linux ________ Apple OS X Windows 7 Windows XP Other Microsoft Windows ________ Other ________
5) Do you have experience installing any Virtual Machines? Which ones?
QEMU/KVM Xen Microsoft Hyper-V Parallels Virtual PC VMware Other ________
6) What different file systems are you familiar with? (circle all that apply)
ext2 / ext3 / ext4 btrfs VFAT NTFS XFS HFS / HFS+ Other ____________
7) Have you used any of the following networked file systems?
NFS NFSV4 SMB/CIFS Ceph Gluster Lustre
8) Do you have experience with advanced storage technologies?
a) If so, which kinds? (circle all that apply)
iSCSI Fibre Channel Multi-path Storage FCoE IBM ZFCP/DASD Firmware RAID Other ________
b) If so, do you have a preferred storage vendor? EMC Dell NetApp IBM Other ________
9) How much experience do you have with Logical Volume Management (LVM)? (circle one)
I've used it before as an automatically-selected / default storage option I've customized it manually before I've resized LVs before I've managed LVM storage across multiple machines
10) Do you prefer to configure software RAID? Yes No
If so, please specify:
RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 4 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID 0+1 RAID 1+0
11) If you customize your storage configuration when installing Linux, how many disks, what kind of layout, and what technologies do you most often use? (Please draw a diagram of how you would set this up)
12) Do you have any other comments about file and storage technologies that you want to share?
_______________________________________________ Anaconda-devel-list mailing list Anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/anaconda-devel-list
On Fri, 2013-01-04 at 19:47 -0800, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
You might ask for gender, since you are asking for age. M/F/prefer not to say
Oh, boy. Don't open THAT can of worms. :)
http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-abou...
(a follow-up to the classics on time:
http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-abou...
and names:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-nam... )
Unless you have a really good reason to ask about gender, it is probably a much better idea just not to do it.
Hi Adam
In scanning your email, I came across a discussion about names. Here in Quebec, the French is termed ancient, in that much of the grammar rules were ones in force in France two centuries ago.
So we have Guillaume Tell for William Tell, and Guillaume for Bill, which is of course a nickname for William.
You may wish to look up Robert Guillaume (French pronounciation for both proname and Family name) to Bob William (Americanized) , a famous actor
Regards Leslie Mr. Leslie Satenstein 50 years in Information Technology and going strong. Yesterday was a good day, today is a better day, and tomorrow will be even better. SENT FROM MY OPEN SOURCE FEDORA LINUX SYSTEM.
mailto:lsatenstein@yahoo.com alternative: leslie.satenstein@itbms.biz www.itbms.biz www.eclipseguard.com
--- On Mon, 1/7/13, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
From: Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com Subject: Re: Feedback on installer/storage survey for usability tests To: "Discussion of Development and Customization of the Red Hat Linux Installer" anaconda-devel-list@redhat.com Date: Monday, January 7, 2013, 2:16 PM
On Fri, 2013-01-04 at 19:47 -0800, Leslie S Satenstein wrote:
You might ask for gender, since you are asking for age. M/F/prefer not to say
Oh, boy. Don't open THAT can of worms. :)
http://www.cscyphers.com/blog/2012/06/28/falsehoods-programmers-believe-abou...
(a follow-up to the classics on time:
http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-abou...
and names:
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-nam... )
Unless you have a really good reason to ask about gender, it is probably a much better idea just not to do it.
Hi folks,
I consulted (with Jaroslav Reznik) my participation and role at DevConf.cz and I should take a local organization. I should also recruit participants for the usability tests (as part of my diploma thesis) because DevConf participants will be too skilled. For this reason it would be good prepare profiles of suitable users (groups of users) and take account of it in the survey.
I made my own very rough draft of survey before I read Stephanie's draft (to not be influenced):
- Gender - Age range (categories: 18-26 / ...) - Education attainment - Employment (position, company size, how long have you been involved,...) - Ethnicity - Computer and Internet experience - Linux (administration) experience - Fedora or some other Anaconda based distribution experience (especially installation) - (new Anaconda (Fedora 18) experience)
There are some extra areas of questions in my rough draft. Most of them are linked to the user profiles (I mentioned earlier). Maybe I should add appropriate questions to the local (Czech) version of survey.
The rest of my draft is very similar to Stephanie's draft. Therefore, I have no objection to the type of questions. I would only clarify some terms in the survey. I think it is important to be unambiguous about the meaning of terms like “Novice”, “Moderate” or “Advanced”. Questions should be more specific and less subjective. We could use frequency and/or time to measure of experience.
Filip
4.1.2013 17:16, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi folks,
I'd like to introduce you to two new contributors who are going to be helping us put the new Anaconda UI through some usability tests:
- Meet Stephanie (cc'ed), who is my UX intern through the Outreach
Program for Women [1] for the next few months. She is a computer science & engineering student from the University of California Merced. Her internship project involves helping us evaluate the usability of the new Anaconda UI.
- Meet Filip (also cc'ed), who is a student working on a diploma thesis
in usability testing & tooling. He is friends with Jaroslav Reznik and is going to be helping us with the usability testing plan, and he is also going to be helping us on the ground running some tests at DevConf.cz.
One important part of a usability testing plan is giving the users who will be running the tests a brief survey to understand their background and technical experience with respect to the software being tested. Having this information about the testers will help us better interpret the test results.
Stephanie has put together an initial cut of the survey we'll be handing to users before they take the Anaconda usability test. We're looking for some feedback on the survey itself - we don't need your answers to the survey, just comments on the structure / content of the survey itself. :) The specific kind of feedback we are looking for is as follows:
Did we miss any key technologies in the lists of questions to ask?
Is any of the wording inaccurate or technically incorrect?
Are there key technical experience or demogrpahic questions that would
affect a user's experience through the interface that we should be asking and aren't here?
I've pasted the latest survey draft below - please let us know your thoughts!
Thanks, ~m
[1] https://live.gnome.org/OutreachProgramForWomen
SURVEY DRAFT
- Please circle which of the following age ranges applies to you:
< 18 18-25 25-30 31-35 36-40 41-50 51-60 61-70 70+
- How often do you use computers and for what reasons? (circle all that
apply)
I don't use computers often. I use computers for work. I use computers at home. I know how to program.
- How much experience do you have with any system administration?
Novice Moderate Advanced
- Do you have experience installing any Operating Systems? Which ones?
Fedora Red Hat Enterprise Linux Other Linux ________ Apple OS X Windows 7 Windows XP Other Microsoft Windows ________ Other ________
- Do you have experience installing any Virtual Machines? Which ones?
QEMU/KVM Xen Microsoft Hyper-V Parallels Virtual PC VMware Other ________
- What different file systems are you familiar with? (circle all that
apply)
ext2 / ext3 / ext4 btrfs VFAT NTFS XFS HFS / HFS+ Other ____________
- Have you used any of the following networked file systems?
NFS NFSV4 SMB/CIFS Ceph Gluster Lustre
- Do you have experience with advanced storage technologies?
a) If so, which kinds? (circle all that apply)
iSCSI Fibre Channel Multi-path Storage FCoE IBM ZFCP/DASD Firmware RAID Other ________
b) If so, do you have a preferred storage vendor? EMC Dell NetApp IBM Other ________
- How much experience do you have with Logical Volume Management (LVM)?
(circle one)
I've used it before as an automatically-selected / default storage option I've customized it manually before I've resized LVs before I've managed LVM storage across multiple machines
- Do you prefer to configure software RAID?
Yes No
If so, please specify:
RAID 0 RAID 1 RAID 4 RAID 5 RAID 6 RAID 10 RAID 0+1 RAID 1+0
- If you customize your storage configuration when installing Linux,
how many disks, what kind of layout, and what technologies do you most often use? (Please draw a diagram of how you would set this up)
- Do you have any other comments about file and storage technologies
that you want to share?
Dne 7.1.2013 17:06, Máirín Duffy napsal(a):
Hi Filip,
On Mon 07 Jan 2013 06:04:51 AM EST, Filip Kosík wrote:
I made my own very rough draft of survey before I read Stephanie's draft (to not be influenced):
Cool, this sounds really good! Can you post your draft version as well and we could potentially merge them?
~m
It was really rough draft (as I mentioned earlier). I just translated it into English, and there is:
Age: [ ] < 18 [ ] 18-26 [ ] …
Nationality: [ ] _________
Education attainment (completed highest level) [ ] Graduate degree [ ] Bachelor's degree [ ] less …
Employment [ ] non-IT [ ] Development, analysis [ ] Tech. support (HW) [ ] Tech. support (SW administration) [ ] Management [ ] …
Size of company [] 0-5 employees [] 6-10 employees [] 11-100 employees [] >100 employees
Computer (and Internet) experience
In a week, how much time do you spend using a computer? [ ] Less than 2 hour a week [ ] 2-5 hours a week [ ] 5-10 hours a week [ ] > 10 hours a week (note: Maybe some other question to clarify the computer experience.)
Which operating system have you ever installed? (Check all that apply) [ ] MS Win [ ] Fedora (17 or less) or some other Anaconda based Linux distribution [ ] Fedora 18 (including Beta) [ ] non-Anaconda Linux [ ] Other ______ (note: It can be very helpful and unique view for us to involve some non-Linux users. In this case, there should be question about other Linux experience.)
Are you linux sys-admin (or have you ever been linux sys-admin)? And how long? [ ] I am not sys-admin [ ] less than half a year [ ] …
If you are linux sys-admin: What is the maximum number of computers that you have ever maintained (as linux sys-admin)? [ ] 1-3 [ ] …
Do you have some experience with virtualization? [ ] Xen [ ] KVM [ ] VirtualBox [] …
Maybe there can be some other questions that enable to estimate the level of experience working/administering with Linux. Like: experience with LVM, NFS, RAID, work with partitions, work with Linux installation server (like Coobbler), kickStart, etc.
Are there some user profiles that would describe the required test participants? Stephanie's survey draft suggests that users (or one group of them) should be linux sys-admins. I think that very important group of test participants should include less experienced users (even linux novices). These profiles could affect the content of the questionnaire.
Filip
Hi Filip!
On 01/07/2013 03:48 PM, Filip Kosík wrote:
Are there some user profiles that would describe the required test participants? Stephanie's survey draft suggests that users (or one group of them) should be linux sys-admins. I think that very important group of test participants should include less experienced users (even linux novices). These profiles could affect the content of the questionnaire.
Yeh, I definitely agree that we need novices testing out the UI as well. I'm thinking ideally we'd have a mix, maybe 50/50, of novice and more technical users. The user profiles in particular that we have in mind are the following three:
1) Novice users (who may be new to Linux entirely) who just want to install a desktop system
2) Experienced Linux users who may dabble in system administration, are very technical, and enjoy trying out different technologies
3) Professional system administrators who work with advanced storage devices and configurations, typically on the job, not really for fun
Do these make sense? We could have variants of the test, some very general (simply to install Fedora in your preferred language/keyboard layout) and give those variants to the novice users, and then have technology-specific variants (install using BTRFS / install using RAID 10 / install using LVM with this layout) and give those variants to the self-identified experience & pro users?
~m
Hi Máirín,
8.1.2013 22:56, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Hi Filip!
On 01/07/2013 03:48 PM, Filip Kosík wrote:
Are there some user profiles that would describe the required test participants? Stephanie's survey draft suggests that users (or one group of them) should be linux sys-admins. I think that very important group of test participants should include less experienced users (even linux novices). These profiles could affect the content of the questionnaire.
Yeh, I definitely agree that we need novices testing out the UI as well. I'm thinking ideally we'd have a mix, maybe 50/50, of novice and more technical users. The user profiles in particular that we have in mind are the following three:
- Novice users (who may be new to Linux entirely) who just want to
install a desktop system
- Experienced Linux users who may dabble in system administration, are
very technical, and enjoy trying out different technologies
- Professional system administrators who work with advanced storage
devices and configurations, typically on the job, not really for fun
I have to agree. That is exactly what I meant and 50/50 sounds good to me. Maybe we should already set some specific numbers for tests at DevConf.cz, because I should start recruiting participants in the near future.
There will be 8 participants of usability lab at DevConf.cz. What is your opinion on the following distribution? Does it make sence?
1) Novice users: 4 2) Experienced users: 2 3) Professional sys-admins: 2 And I think that there can be one extra person (as a reserve) who can be from the group of experienced users.
Do these make sense? We could have variants of the test, some very general (simply to install Fedora in your preferred language/keyboard layout) and give those variants to the novice users, and then have technology-specific variants (install using BTRFS / install using RAID 10 / install using LVM with this layout) and give those variants to the self-identified experience & pro users?
~m
Thanks, Filip
Hi Tim,
7.1.2013 17:06, Tim Flink wrote:
b) If so, do you have a preferred storage vendor? EMC Dell ...
This is another one that I'm not really clear on - how does the storage vendor relate to OS installer usability? The only thing I can think of is to get an idea of which third-party drivers might be needed (would any of that be open source, though?), where to focus integration testing or if there was some sort of interface to the storage controller during installation but there can be quite a bit of variation between product lines of a single vendor. and we could potentially merge them?
I have to agree that some questions are not related to usability tests of Fedora installer. On the other hand, some questions are necessary to know our participants (determine their level of skill/knowledge of Linux). Also we want to find people who fit user profiles for our tests (there will be several different profiles - which we discuss with Duffy in this thread).
Filip
anaconda-devel@lists.fedoraproject.org
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"Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" -
Adam Williamson -
Brian C. Lane -
Chris Murphy -
Filip Kosík -
Leslie S Satenstein -
Máirín Duffy -
Robyn Bergeron -
Tim Flink