HCI Assignment 3: Usability of Bittorrent Clients
We’ve chosen to analyze a type of application that is used for an ever growing type of file sharing called Bittorrent. There is an official client that is called Bittorrent but we won’t be evaluating its performance since it is so infrequently used. Instead we’ve chosen three alternative popular clients: Azureus, Transmission, and Deluge. There were many other clients to choose from and certainly other good ones but we performed our tests on Ubuntu and picked our favorites that were available from the default Ubuntu repositories.
The very first impression that was made upon each application’s launch; they looked quite different from each other. Azureus was defaulted to full screen and Transmission was very small.
Contents
Usage Illustrations – Creating a Torrent file 4
Azureus
Deluge
Transmission
Holistic Analysis
The task we’ve chosen is creating a torrent file to be shared. This is a process that people, who like to share files, do frequently and as such should be optimized for usability and speed.
We’ve decided that the clear winner in usability is Deluge. It’s large and easily recognized buttons make it easy to quickly find what you want to do.
Conversely, we think that Azureus is an utter failure of usability for having nearly the opposite of ideal design- small unlabeled icons that aren’t very clearly understood. Its dubious design may be a result of it being written in Java, which certainly detracts from its overall speed- but makes it a candidate for usage on all platforms with a Java Virtual Machine.
Usage Illustrations – Creating a Torrent file
Deluge
Click New Torrent
First click the radio button (RED), then click the file browser (BLUE) to select the
file to share, then type in a torrent file name (GREEN) and finally click Save
This is where Deluge really dropped the ball. You MUST type in a torrent name. The other client applications will have a default filename chosen for you based on the file that you wanted to share. To make matters worse- once you’ve typed the name in you cannot just press enter and move on, you must use the mouse to click Save.
We’re letting it download in its default directory so click OK
Azureus
Click the really small unmarked piece of paper icon, aka create a torrent
Over complicated, we didn’t need anything here: just click Next
Browse for file then click next
Filename was already filled in for us based on the file we were going to share- click Finish
Click Close, we’re finished with Azureus.
Transmission
Click Torrent and go to Create New Torrent: Note, this was the first time we had to enter a file menu.
Clean display, nothing complicated here! Just choose ’single file’ and then click the file browser Icon
Click New. And that’s it. Seriously.
Qualitative Analysis
Contrary to our naïve prediction that Deluge would be the client with the highest usability it becomes painfully clear that, in fact, it is worse than Azureus in our tests. We had to make a prediction for what the constant time for typing in a torrent file name would be. We decided that the typing constant would be a great hit- 20 performance points. Clearly because taking your hand off the mouse and typing a name and then moving back to the mouse is a lot of time lost. Additionally since every application has the same file browse constant we chose not to include that in their overall usability scores (Fitts).
All measurements are in centimeters
Conclusion
This means the clear winner is Transmission by a landslide. Its simplistic design and great design blew away the competition. According to our calculations it received a usability score which is nearly twice as good as both of the other clients. It was quite a surprise to us that Transmission won in the calculations.
The one correction that would need to be made to make Transmission even better would be to add a large icon for ‘New Torrent’ as Deluge had.
This one simple change would increase he usability by negating the need to open the file menu and change the direction of the mouse to complete the action.
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July 25th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
I got %100 on this project. /bow