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KDissert for Documenting Usability Test Results

el's picture

At aKademy, Frank performed a live usability test with Thomas Nagy's kdissert, a powerful mindmapping tool for building texts.

I extended the usability test a bit and used kdissert myself to summarise the results. This is an extract of the mindmap:

[image:1524 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet]

There are multiple ways to structure usability reports*: You can structure it by the software components which are affected, by general usability guidelines (consistency, user guidance, error tolerance), or you can structure them according to the use cases that were tested. Which one to select mostly depends on the target audience - developers prefer software components, usability people prefer guidelines and managers prefer use cases**.

In this case I chose to structure the report according to the use cases. Each first-level leave of the mindmap corresponds to a task. The second level leaves illustrate the steps the users performed. The sequence of the steps corresponds the priority of each step.

[image:1523 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet]

The users' behaviour as well as suggestions can be described in more detail in a leave's comments field.

[image:1525 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet]

But kdissert is not only a mindmapping tool. A text document, presentation or html file can be generated from the mindmap. In a text document, the comments will be shown in the corresponding subchapters. This makes the whole tool quite cool, as it supports both a visual arrangement of your ideas and the linguistic elaboration Smiling

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* Note that this case can not really be called a usability test as only one user was tested (it was a live test at aKademy and I've not yet had the time to test more users).

**This classification is, of course, over simplified Eye-wink

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reinhold kainhofer's picture

KDissert is great, but...

I have one big problem with kdissert: It tries to be too smart and teach me what I should do. In particular, there is no copy'n'paste functionality in kdissert, and the justification is that one should always try to be original and if you have the need for a copy and paste then your ideas are not clear enough. KDissert tells me that one should try to break the symmetries in that case. (Yes, that's from a tip of the day!).

Great! Makes sense! Well, sometimes, but not in my case. What if you really need to create several nodes with children that have exactly the same structure? I finally sat down and tried to create some personas for korganizer. Each of them has exactly the same children structure (name, age, location, goals, etc.), only with some different values. Why do I have to type (and format!) everything over and over again, when it would be so much simpler to just copy one node and its children and then just adapt them???

Cheers,
Reinhold

ita_'s picture

wrong tool for the job

Use kspread for this task.

The last missing bit in kdissert is the possibility of attaching tables or diagrams (special kind of structured data).

el's picture

happy birthday, reinhold 8-)

Have you talked to Thomas about it?

In the test we had the same problem: Frank changed the layout of a leave (font etc.) but not of the root. He wanted to copy the leave to get the same layout for another leave, but that did not work. Maybe copying is not so bad after all?!

Enjoy your birthday Smiling
/el

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