1 Mulberry HCI Evaluation: Interface Simplification Mini-Project Final Report By Mathew Halpern & Aaron Powers3Table of Contents Introduction Visual Redesign Main Window Scoping Problems Mail/Addresses/Calendar Tabs Reversing the Maximize/Close Widgets Removal of Extra Lines Spacing Issues Icons/Labels Email Header Focus Issues Remove Non-Standard Widgets New Message Window Received Message Window Toolbar Customizable Toolbar Toolbar Button Titles and Icons Titles Icons Default Button Sets Menus, Popup Menus, and Dialogs Popup Menus Menus Dialogs Alert Messages Appendices Appendix A: Default Button Sets5Introduction Each year a new class of 1300 freshmen arrives at CMU. For most them it will be their first time using Mulberry. Every college or university using the software is in the same situation. These facts underscore the necessity of Mulberry being intuitive and easy to learn. The goal of the interface simplification mini-project is to make many of the main parts of Mulberry easier and more intuitive to learn. Making software easy to learn is requires a number of things. First, one must understand how users learn software, which is of course through exploration (Carroll and Rosen 1987; Fischer 1991). Users search an interface for the widget that seems most apt to produce results they require. Many factors affect a user’s ability to find what they are looking for. These include the number of interface elements presented to them, and the order in which these are displayed. The labels used on the interface are also important, as well as the labels’ clarity, their mapping to users’ expectations, and their similarity to one another. Finally, we must understand our users, their needs and backgrounds, and their mental models of the specific domain of email. Our recommendations are the results of rigorous process including scores of user tests, heuristic evaluations, cognitive walkthroughs, and surveys. Each change highlighted in this paper will include a summery of the evidence that led to its recommendation as well as all relevant graphics.7Visual Redesign This section deals with the look and feel of the interface. The goals of this section include reducing clutter, which makes information difficult to digest. Other changes deal with widget behavior and its mapping to user expectations.8Main Interface Tab Scope A tab indicates that information is stacked, one form on top of another. Clicking a tab brings the associated information to the top level. Thus the scope of the tab can be considered to be the area replaced when another tab is clicked. During our heuristic evaluation we noticed that the tabs in the folder view were incorrectly scoped. A user looking at the interface would guess that clicking on the Contacts tab changes only the context of the window below. But clicking contacts actually changes the contents of the entire window. To remedy this problem we suggest scoping the tabs correctly, placing them above the affected area. There is a trade-off between making these tabs visually attached to the entire area and using up vertical space. However, it was our opinion that the gain from scoping these correctly overshadows the loss of space. Furthermore, the tabs allow for new functionality to be added in an organized way. Since a calendar tab will soon be added here, more of the horizontal space these new tabs require will be put to good use.9Tabbed Mailbox Browsing During our heuristic evaluations, we also noticed a problem with the maximize and close widgets, and the way they affect tabbed mailbox browsing. A user might believe that clicking on the maximize icon (on the right of the above image) would expand only the contents of the tab selected. The maximize widget actually expands the entire set of tabs. That same user could conclude that clicking the X icon might close the entire message-list window, and not just the tab selected. Our solution, seen above, was first to switch these two icons, creating the correct scope for their functions. Next we expanded the tab bar to the edge of the pane, and placed the close icon inside of it. Now it is quite clear that clicking it only closes the current tab. Finally we removed the line separating the tabs from the name of the mailbox. This was done to reduce clutter. A line usually indicates separation, the beginning of a new section. They were joined together since there are no distinctions between the two elements.10Remove Non-Standard Widgets During the heuristic evaluations, we also found a variety of non-standard interface elements. The pane resize widget is particularly troublesome. During a user a test one subject clicked it expecting the pane to close like a drawer. The purpose of the widget is to let users know that the different panes can be resized. However, users can click any where on the edge of a pane to resize it. Therefore if most of our users are familiar with the convention of pane resizing the widget may not be necessary. Given that most applications that split their windows allow resizing without any widget indicating that possibility, our opinion is that this widget is unnecessary. Furthermore removing this widget will help reduce clutter, and placing the panes closer together will tighten up the layout of the application. Another non-standard widget we recommended removing was the hide toolbar icon. This widget was designed for a target set of users who were mostly working on laptops with 640x480 screen resolutions1. This is very small for today’s computing averages, which even in 2001 averaged 800x600 with only 5% of users at 640x480, -- probably even less of those in the university communities.2 Today the average may be as high as 1024x768, but few statistics are publicly available on this from 2003. Although in general it is a good thing to allow users to customize the interface, hiding the toolbar is unlikely to be very useful. As monitors increase in size and resolution it is rare that vertical space is at such a premium that a user would need this feature. In general, if a feature has little utility we would recommend removing it. We recommend this for the sake of simplicity and clutter. 1 Au, Irene and Shuang Li, “Netscape Communicator’s Collapsible Toolbars.” The Proceedings of the Computer-Human Interaction Conference (CHI), 1998, pp. 81-86. The text of this paper is available on