Solaris Installer Prototype Evaluation

Introduction

This is a report about the usability study done on December 13th, 2005.

Participants:

• P1: Developer
• P2: Developer
• P3: Windows system administrator with 15+ years of experience

Findings

• Participants seemed to generally like the installer. Those with experience with the current Solaris installer felt it was much better. Generally seemed to feel it was comparable with Windows.
• Developers seemed to want the installer to be as simple as possible. The admin wanted much more control over what got installed.
  • This reinforces a feeling that I (David Burrowes) have about developers and which was articulated for me at the recent Solaris Desktop Usbility conference. Developers are basically ordinary users (who perhaps know some small portion of the system really well. This is quite different from a system admin who cares a lot about how the system is organized.
• Neither developer seemed to fully understand what the page about partitions was asking, at first. It seemed to be unnecessarily complex to them.
• All participants showed uncertainty about using this page. The "unpartioned space" portion wasn't always understood, and not all felt it was clear that it was selected, when it was.
• The "Try" label on the try button was very unclear to everyone, though when asked a couple guessed the purpose correctly
• The sysadmin suggested that the "livecd" variety might be really useful as a diagnostic and debugging tool in their daily job.
• One participant commented that they didn't see the reason for needing to specially click the "I accept this agtreement" button on the legal page.
• None of the participants explored the "More" button (to select which parts get installed) in the "ready to install" page.
• All felt that asking for the hostname was good
• Mixed feelings about asking for network settings. Participants weren't sure this was needed (but liked being able to test the network connection, and P3 pointed out that adjustments to the network driver could and should be done here.
• One participant suggested that setting the timezone should be done from the date and time page
• All felt it was reasonable to ask for a root password. Mixed feelings whether creating an initial user was needed
• Very mixed reactions to asking about drivers in the last page of the initial configuration sequence. Except for video and audio, weren't sure this was really needed for the mainstream
• As long as one could just "Next" past any confusing pages in this configuration sequence, the participants seemed relatively tolerant to being shown "irrelevant" stuff
• Mixed reactions were given about the desktop. P2 said she'd prefer to use the environment she was familiar with (CDE).
• All participants indicate that they like and use the workspace switcher feature
• All participants were familiar with Windows enough to like the familiar arrangement of the interface.
• All guessed correctly where they would go to do system configuration. Indications that sticking closely to Windows would be appreciated.

Materials

 This study used this Flash movie as the "software" to be tested.