Learning from users

We recently released JAlbum 7.3.1. Apart from fixes to some really annoying bugs, this release focused on addressing small usability issues that we were totally unaware that people were having trouble with. You are probably aware of this phenomena: When you start using a piece of software you bump into all kinds of smaller issues that you might figure out to work around, and then you forget about them. However, if you get stuck, you might just dump the whole software in frustration. Our problem is that we've been using JAlbum for so long so we have become blinded to some of these issues.

So, a couple of days back, we conducted a user study, kindly asking a bunch of people that had no previous experience with JAlbum to make an album with JAlbum and put it online (and paid their lunches ;-) ). We ended up going through 3 hours of film. I can tell you it was a very good experience. I think we ended up finding about 50 items for improvement of which some have made it into the 7.3.1 release. Let me give you one exampe. Half of the group tried the local slide show option in JAlbum and most of them got stuck in the slide show. For me it's natural to "simply" hit the ESC key, but perhaps it isn't for others? Here is another one. Most users went for the Publish button without making an album first. JAlbum eventually tells that you have to make an album before publishing it, but at that point, users look for how to make the album within the publish window and get frustrated.

Learning from this, we will rearrange the user interface of JAlbum somewhat so the buttons are ordered according to the work flow. It's obviously not very clever to have the make album button in the lower left corner while having the publish button in the top right for instance. We who are used to using JAlbum don't reflect on this, but this study made us realize some steps needed to make the average computer user get along with JAlbum. Don't worry though, we will not remove features for power-users. The challenge is to meet everyone's needs.