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Hello,
I hope we didn’t get off on the wrong foot here. We’re university students; we’re here to learn, and if we can also provide something of value to the calibre community, that’s great. If not, then so be it - we’ll still learn from this experience.
We’re not here to “take over” or proclaim our superior usability boffin ways; we just want to hone our skills while hopefully providing something real or useful to you, the calibre community. We understand that this whole scenario might seem rather annoying, that is, a group of random students coming out of the blue and starting a big usability discussion. We wouldn’t have chosen calibre as our subject matter if we hadn’t considered it as quality software. The idea of choosing this software in the first place for our project subject came from one of our members who had been a regular user of calibre for some time, and we wanted to see if it could be further improved in some way.
Now, some specifics; we plan to conduct tests with a small sample of people. Relatives, friends, etc. from different backgrounds and age groups who have not previously used calibre but express an interest in reading, and who have at least basic computer skills. We cannot devote a huge amount of time and resources to only just this however, as it would be outside the scope of what we are doing. We have a limited amount of work hours to devote to this project, and once those are filled, we are done. As such, we have to plan the project so that we do not over-extend ourselves on one task and end up not being able to finish the project properly with the remaining time.
In addition to these tests, we will also perform so called expert reviews from the point of view of a computer scientist (student). We will apply our knowledge to these reviews as it has been taught to us during our studies; whether it works in the context of the calibre project remains to be seen. We are shifting our focus on specific matters more than broad generalizations, however, as suggested by you. This may, in fact, prove to be a good way of applying usability work to something with a long legacy like that of calibre.
Regarding the comments on heuristic evaluation, we completely agree that blindly following some checklists will do no good if the software’s special characteristics aren’t taken into account. However, “more than one way to complete tasks”, “cross-platform”, “integration with wide variety of technologies”, “extensibility” and “documentation” aren’t characteristics that would make calibre different from any other software in terms of usability / how “pleasant” the program is to use overall.
Any software is usable to someone who has used the software for a decade and knows all of its ins and outs. This doesn’t mean that a new user has the same experience. Our aim is to diagnose these problem points for newer users and propose possible changes to them, WITHOUT hampering the existing functionalities. We do not want to dumb down calibre!
What you do with our findings is of course up to you. We hope that we can do a good enough of a job that we can at least spark conversation of usability work within the calibre project. But if you deem that there is nothing that usability efforts could provide for you, that’s your prerogative.
TL;DR: We’re here to learn and hopefully provide value to the calibre community; please don’t murder us!
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