Assignment 4: Knowledge Management in the OpenOffice Suite Evaluation

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Assignment 4 Knowledge Management in the
OpenOffice Suite Evaluation

• Judy Blostein, Jennifer Hocko, and Bob Lim
• Waltham Interactive Design
• May 2, 2001

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Presentation Outline

• Project Approach (Bob).
• Unexpected Problems Solved (Judy).
• Finding and Marketing Implications (Jen).
• Conclusions (Jen).

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Project Approach

• Problem Definition
• Office scenarios
• Goals for each application
• Word processing
• Spreadsheet
• Presentation
• Application of Lessons Learned
• Task decomposition and time estimating
• Reuse of prior document elements

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Unexpected Problems Solved

• What Evaluation Criteria to Use?
• Those defined by assignment
• Nielsens ten usability heuristics
• How to Record Usability Data?
• Create standardized data collection form
• How to Process the Data After Individual
  Collection?
• Incident count chart determines report discussion

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Creation of Evaluation Data Collection Form

• The form
• Provided consistent record of usability incidents
• Became an integral part of teams knowledge
  management

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Incident Count Chart in Evaluation of Suites
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Findings and Marketing Implications

• Selected Heuristics
• Visibility of system status (mostly absent)
• Match between system and real world (MSWord
  real world?)
• User control and freedom (anticipate user actions
  versus only explicit controls)

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Findings and Marketing Implications

• Marketing Implications
• Usability problems and the snowball effect
• Need to address user habituation to MS products
• MS very publicly improving usability efforts
• Attention to usability/human factors issues
  critical to product success

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Conclusions

• Fixing usability problems will add to product
  value
• Sun must incorporate usability as part of open
  source initiative
• OpenOffice has advantages (such as platform
  independence) but must not fall behind in
  usability efforts