myExperiment discussion ()

Ross Gardler | 23 Nov 2011 12:23

Assistance in Usability Evaluation

Dear MyExperiment Users and Developers,
OSS Watch are running a JISC project involving creating a mobile
widget-based interface to the MyExperiment web site. As users of the
site we would greatly value your opinions on the work we have done.
The ‘Rave in Context’ project has been funded by JISC to develop a set
of software ‘widgets’ to enable researchers to use mobile devices –
primarily smartphones and tablets – to access myExperiment.
myExperiment is a web-based environment in which researchers can share
their research objects and form communities with people engaged
insimilar work. We are running a usability lab to evaluate the widgets
on Tuesday 29th November and would be very pleased if you could take
part.
The aspects of the software that are testing are very simple: you
don’t have to be familiar with virtual research  environments as you
will be mainly browsing and searching for items of information, and
doing activities that will be easily recognisable from any social
networking application. The activities should take ~30 minutes.

The usability lab will be held in the Kennet room at OUCS on 13
Banbury Road, Oxford. It will be open from 10am to 4pm on Tuesday 29th
November.
If you are available to take part, please send an email to
info@... indicating one (preferably two) times during the
day when you can attend. This is to ensure that each participant can
receive due attention from the project team.
Thank you – and we look forward to hearing from you.
--

-- 
Ross Gardler ( <at> rgardler)
Programme Leader (Open Development)
OpenDirective http://opendirective.com

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Ross Gardler | 23 Nov 2011 12:33

Re: Assistance in Usability Evaluation

I thought it would be useful to let this community know the status of
our work on the below mentioned widgets.

We've hit a number of problems relating to the feature set of the API
with respect to what we could implement in this short project. For
example, there are no API methods for editing existing content.

Our widgets are, in the main either read only or a simulation of
editing (i.e. we provide the UI but it does not fully interact with
the MyExperiment back end).

Since the main outputs of the JISC funded project is a templating
framework for building common widgets (browse/search/edit etc.) we
have not yet reported the issues we have faced to this community. Our
efforts have been focussed on the creation of the widget templates
rather than fully functional MyExperiment widgets.

That being said all the widgets are open source (Apache License V2).
If the MyExperiment community sees any value in the widgets we have
created, which can be hosted as mobile applications or within other
environments, such as Moodle, Drupal, Wordpress etc. we would be happy
to work with you on making them usable.

It would be great if at least one member of this community could
participate in the testing so that any future potential for these
widgets can be evaluated.

Thanks,
Ross

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