Examples

We've had the opportunity to both program and to review many different software applications. Ranging from Windows GUIs, to Linux command lines, to web sites for mobile phones, we've seen a lot and made lots of recommendations.

Below are samples from some of our reviews. Because we treat your review as completely confidential, we cannot post a full review or release any identifying information in these samples.

Regarding content consistency in an online statistics tutor, we said:

Your instructional material is, overall, very thorough and detailed, but we had difficulty understanding the lesson in two key areas:

  1. Your alternate use of "class" and "bin" to describe the statistical group.
  2. Your assertion that a data set was present in the applet.

To alleviate number one, you should use one term consistently (even though they are interchangeable in statistics jargon) and provide a dictionary of terms. Linking directly to the term from the first use of the word will significantly increase the likelihood of student retention.

To alleviate number two, you should make sure the applet has the indicated data set loaded. Ideally, you should only show the relevant data set in the applet OR automatically select the relevant data set when launching the applet. Both of these are easily accomplished using SWING.

Regarding the usability of a forms-heavy web application, we said:

Your forms are well thought out and adhere to many form usability guidelines. We particularly liked the use of the right-aligned form labels in the muted grey color with fire-engine red required marks. We also thought that you chose reasonable defaults for all values, which minimized the amount of data entry we needed to perform.

However, one small improvement could be made to most of your forms. When showing the form, place the focus into the first field. This allows the user to save a click and begin typing immediately. It appears that you are using the Prototype Javascript library, so you should be able to use $('FormID').focusFirstElement();

Note that the login and the register new account forms are exceptions, as they already focus on the first field. Additionally, you may want to avoid focusing the first field on the dashboard, as that would focus the search box. We recommend additional user testing to see if the search box would benefit from immediate focus.

As a corollary to this recommendation, put the fields the user must supply first in the form. This was generally the case, except in the node management forms.

Regarding the accessibility of a desktop application for users with visual impairment, we said:

Your icons are clear, colorful, and meaningful on every platform we tested using 32-bit color depth. However, we noted a few specific usability problems that will affect the experience for users with visual impairment.

First, your icons degrade substantially when viewed on a 4- or 8-bit color depth monitor. The icons lost all sense of meaning and it was impossible for us to distinguish one from the other except by their position. Second, you do not offer text labels for the icons in your tool bar, which makes it impossible for screen readers to identify the icon and inconveniences users who prefer text-only buttons in their tool bar.

We recommend that you provide icons for lower color depth and use them when the software operates at lower depths. Additionally, we recommend labeling all icons for maximum accessibility and flexibility. In Eclipse SWT, you may consider having a different directory containing your lower color depth icons but with the same names as their counterparts in the higher color depth directory. Then, you simply need to swap the input stream at start-up and no other code changes are needed. For the labels, make sure you instantiate using labels: argument #1 is the string, which you can get from a string table, and argument #2 is the image.

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