Esha Datta Monish Subherwal

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• Esha Datta ? Monish Subherwal

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Outline

• Background
• Mission
• Methods
• Recommendations
• Conclusion

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Target Audience

• Cal Population
• 23,000  undergraduate students
• 10,000 graduates
• 2,000 faculty

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Prior to Summer
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Recent CalMail Interface
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Goals

• Assess the current usability of CalMail
• Understand what Cal students want and need from
  CalMail
• Define the purpose of a school e-mail system

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Methods
Survey 7 Undergrads, 7 Grads, 1 staff
Interviews 3 undergrads, 2 grads, 1 staff
Usability Study 3 undergrads
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10 questions via SurveyMonkey
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Interviews - Frequently mentioned

• Features
• Most important E-mail forwarding, campus
  links/news
• Somewhat important Calendars, conversation
  threading
• Least important Chat
• Problems
• Aesthetics, auto-contacts, blocking spam
• Other
• Spell checking, viewing attachments, scrolling
  through all messages

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Interviews - Notable Quotes
CalMail sucks and could be way better. Its
really bad and for this type of university, it
does not do justice. Being an engineer, I like
how simple and ugly it looks, but this is really
bad.
It just looks really ghetto, not friendly at
all. It looks like it was developed ten years
ago.
It should be a priority to filter. As a student
we have a lot of things going on. Its important
for us to keep class stuff aside and our social
stuff aside.
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Usability Testing

• Problems
• Ambiguous Wording
• Advanced Mail Management
• Auto-contacts
• Search
• System Feedback
• Unclear Navigation

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Design Recommendations

• 1 Speak the Users Language

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Ambiguous Wording - Main Page
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Ambiguous Wording - Quotes

• I mean, whats purge!?  Does anyone know what
  purge does!?  Im sure its from some guy who
  created Unix!
• Q What do you think purge does?
• A I dont know, Im scared to try it

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Ambiguous Wording - Main Page
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Design Recommendations

• 2 Relevant System Feedback(Refresh both
  frames!)

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• Show us how you would create a folder

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System Feedback Creating a Folder
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
?
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
?
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
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System Feedback Creating a Folder
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Design Recommendations

• 3 Keep the Quota Status Bar

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Design Recommendations

• 4 CalMail represents our school. Make it
  aesthetically pleasing.

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Aesthetics - Quotes

• The design of the entire page (and much of the
  rest of the site) looks like the result of some
  freshman CS student's unfinished class project

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Design Recommendations

• 5 Auto-Contacts

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• 6 Put Advanced Mail Management in one location
  Spam, E-Mail Forwarding, Rules/Filters

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• You are experiencing a lot of Spam.  
• Show us how you would get rid of the Spam?  

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Recent CalMail Interface
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Design Recommendations

• 7 Improve search function and keep the search
  on the main homepage

Search
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Design Recommendations

• 8 Sort by size to make it easier to deal with
  limited storage space

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Design Recommendations

• 9 Incorporate links to other relevant Berkeley
  sites (but in an unobtrusive way)

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