Finished the Google Wave Usability Testing Paper!

I have been spending a lot of time working on the usability testing of Google Wave for my final research project in the HCI class.  Things went well overall for the testing (especially considering that Google Wave is in a preview / pre-beta mode).

The hardest part of the process was getting the Google Wave invites.  I have an account (so I can invite others), but it took almost a week to get the invites.  Which normally is not too bad of a deal, but because of some procrastination on my part, we got the invites worked out just a couple of days before the usability study was scheduled with my participants.

Overall, we had three people familiar with computers, but not computer experts by any means.  All three participants were familiar with computers in general and I had done a little one-on-one training with them before hand and provided them the link to the Gina Trapani's Complete Guide to Google Wave (http://completewaveguide.com).  However, the participants were not overly familiar with using Google Wave.

The study consisted of the following simple tasks:

• Create a Grocery List


• Copy Text from a Document


• Create a Birthday Card

Overall, the participants did well on the study (as far as following the instructions of the study).  The birthday card was the only component they were not very successful and creating.  The difficulty is in manipulating the position of the images within the document itself.  Although it is an issue with Google Wave, this is not really what Google Wave was designed for (desktop publishing).  Additionally, Google Wave is not really even in beta yet, so there are some rough edges.

The grocery list worked out the best (not that I would expect real-world application of this).  I think distributed groups brainstorming on a common idea is the current best real-world case for Google Wave.

Google Wave Usability HCI Testing

I have been looking for an excuse to get more into using Google Wave, but since I generally do not collaborate on most projects with other people, I have not found a good use for Google Wave.  That was true until now.  For the final project in the CSCI-685 class, I am working on testing the usability of Google Wave to collaborate on a document in real time and also asynchronously.

Google Wave (http://wave.google.com) allows multiple user collaboration on document editing (and many other tasks) in a combined real-time and also off-line mode.  The changes are tracked, recorded and can be replayed or removed by members of the wave.  For some documentation on using wave see The Complete Guide to Google Wave (http://completewaveguide.com/) by Gina Trapani.

Right now, I am working on the set of tasks for the users to try.  Here is the first list of items I am thinking of:

• Create a new wave (each participant creates one from the list below)


• Invite the other participants to the wave


• Edit the document in real-time


• Edit the document async


• Revert changes

I was thinking of creating waves with the following topics:

• Birthday party invitation


• Grocery shopping list


• Simple results report


• Application feature list

I will be working on formalizing the list and working through the process of recruiting volunteers (I need at least three or four) from my group of friends.  For the real time vs. async changes, I was planning on having the users all at the same location, but have them leave the room (or otherwise disconnect from the wave) for the async portion of the tests.

Cisco IOS and the Importance of Saving the Configurations

I was called out to a customer location yesterday afternoon for an emergency.  The customer was in the process of doing some routine maintenance on their power system.  They were prepared to lose power on their servers.  However, the network gear did not have the configuration saved (for quite a while).  So, when the lost power, some of the Cisco network equipment reverted back to an older configuration.

This caused a number of issues with their building interconnects (which were set to access-ports, not trunk ports) and most of their servers.  The servers were all in the wrong VLAN making DHCP / DNS / AD services unavailable.  Of course, the customer did not have any documentation on the way things were supposed to be configured, nor was the main LAN administrator available to help out.

A nice feature for Cisco to add to devices is a notification on log-on / log-off that the configuration is not saved.  At a minimum, it would be nice if the devices would auto-save the running configuration periodically or on the generation of the configuration change log message.  This auto-save would not auto-save to the startup-configuration but to an archive configuration file.

To help with this process, I am going to start working on an embedded event manager (EEM) script to look for syslog messages with the configuration change message and then copy the running-config to the archive-config file.  This should help with this situation in the future.

Stay tuned for an updated post regarding the script.