Evaluating the User Experience
We’ve been recently trying to evaluate the UX of the proposed Authorization Manager and other components of the UMA eco-system. One of the MSc students from Newcastle University, Iain Carter, has prepared a questionnaire and will be evaluating the UX of our prototype AM. We’re looking for some volunteers that want to participate in this preliminary study so if you want to provide some feedback or you just want to criticise what we’ve done then drop us an email and we’ll refer you to Iain.
Below are some screenshots of what you’d be evaluating:
And some screenshots of UMA-enabled applications:
Categories: Development, Usability, UX
It all looks simple enough but…This has a similar look and feel with multiple authorization ceremonies, some of which seemed OK at first, but over time caused unexpected side effects, like spammed to death; not your problem, but my paranoia
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First I login with the usual UN/PW, then I get a vague offer — take it or leave it. It protects (whatever that means) my resources from something — what exactly? piracy? sharing far and wide? partial sharing? deletion? The value prop is unknown without more context — (what was I trying to do when I logged in anyway?) I probably didn’t expect an offer I’m not sure what it does, but I trust Newcastle U, so I say ‘OK’…then I see my resources, and another vague ‘share with family and friends’ — if I want to share, how do I identify to this site exactly who these people are? Is this somehow linked to my Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn networks, which after a while contain some people that fit the sharing criteria (although never explicitly tagged), but many that don’t? Now I have to guess at what Newcastle might already know about some of my social networks. Or I decide that nobody gets access because it’s just too hard to choose, monitor, filter, and administer. After all, my girlfriend last week may not be someone I want to share next weeks photos with… etc. Uh Oh. Facebook Friends. oops here we go. Unless I want to share everything with everyone, I probably don’t want to share anything. How again did Facebook Friends map to family? Last week, my school buddies were my friends, but my grandmother just joined FB asked me to be her friend, and those Vegas pictures are not what I want to share with Nana.
Choose my preferred authorization manager — do I ever get more than one choice? presumably yes, otherwise why ask at all? where are the other choices?
Then I get to the smart gallery, and presumably can select some subset of pictures to ‘make public’. How does this align with the policies I set up earlier? How many policies with how many claims in each can I have? (presumably multiple of each) How do each of these map to ‘make public?’
I am all for making things as simple as possible but no simpler. Not sure this is there yet. Hope it does!
I see these screens are just a *sample* not an actual complete flow; so take the comments above with “appropriate salinity”.