John Benson

CSG170

Individual HW7

Disorganizer

Usability Heuristic	Usability Problem or Success	Severity
Simple and Natural Dialogue	(1) Layout of application is very good. In a very short time, you can understand what are the functions that can be done with the application. (2) Having some functions in the top menu bar, and the rest of the functions at the bottom of the application makes the user have to hunt around to top or bottom of screen to be able to do something. It may be better to have all functions at the top of the screen, possibly all in menus. (3) Use of colors is excellent, for example in distinguishing “idea” notes (yellow) from bills (gray) and “reminder” notes (pink). The gray/black color scheme for menus is good, and similar to Microsoft Office. (4) In terms of the structure of the group, I like that the four corners of the group are used. One corner shows the group name. The upper left corner selects the group and allows you to move the group, the upper right corner can magnify or de-magnify the group, and the lower right corner can move or re-size the group.	(1) Good (2) Minor (3) Good (4) Good
Speak the Users’ Language	(1) The application has excellent mapping to the real world. Creating notes, posting them on a surface, and moving them around is almost exactly how one would do it in the real world. (2) The language used to refer to “notes”, “bills”, “group”, “ungroup”, “print”, “delete”, “search” have analogs in the real world and/or commonly used Windows applications, such as Microsoft Office. (3) It was interesting that when dragging a note out of a group, the application wouldn’t let you drag the note outside one of the “walls” of the group if that wall on the group was at the edge of the application. I guess this is the same as what would happen on a real-world desktop. (4) The “bill” type of note has the additional field which allows the user to specify when the bill is due. It may be helpful to have some other pre-defined fields such as dollar amount, and what the bill is for, as well as having a notes field to include any other relevant text about the bill.	(1) Good (2) Good (3) Good (4) Minor
Minimize User’s Memory Load
Consistency	(1) There is a little bit of a consistency issue in that for notes you magnify/de-magnify by double-clicking. For groups, you magnify/de-magnify by either double-clicking or using the magnifier glass located in the upper right-hand corner of the group. (2) Actions performed on note objects have the same outcome, whether or not the note is part of a group. (3) When I double-clicked on a group, I expected it to be “selected” at the same time. The group was not actually selected, though. (When you double-click on a note, it is selected, and thus you can delete it for example.) I double-clicked on a group, and tried to sort it, and the sorting didn’t work. I found out that double-clicking does not select the group.	(1) Minor (2) Good (3) Major
Feedback	(1) The use of colors to highlight the border of a note in red if it matches a search is excellent. The user can quickly and easily see which note(s) match a text search. (2) Dragging notes around provided excellent real-time updates of the note moving around the screen. (3) I like that you can take individual notes out of a group by dragging it out with the mouse. (4) You know that a note or group has been “selected” when it has a yellow border around it. Then, you are able to perform operations on it like delete, or group/ungroup (for groups) and sort (for groups).	(1) Good (2) Good (3) Good (4) Good
Clearly Marked Exits
Shortcuts	(1) Having keyboard shortcuts for the operations of “create group” and “ungroup” speeds up these operations for expert users. (2) At times during use, I found myself using the right-click button on the mouse, hoping that a short menu would pop up from which I could select an action, such as group, ungroup, or create new note. So, I guess I was expecting a Windows-like pop-up menu to be there.	(1) Good (2) Minor
Good Error Messages
Prevent Errors	(1) This may be difficult to implement, but I found that an “undo” button would have been helpful at times, to undo a mistake that I made. (2) The use of both text and pictures to indicate what a menu item does is helpful. The redundancy makes user feel confident about what the menu item will do.	(1) Minor (2) Good
Help and Documentation	(1) The icons used to move and re-size a group window were somewhat explanatory as to what they would do. However, I would have benefited from having tool-tips layered on top of them so I had more insight as to what they did. For example, it took me a while to realize that I could re-size and move a group.	(1) Minor