I’m only going to school Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

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

Holistic Analysis    3

Usage Illustrations – Creating a Torrent file    4

Deluge    4

Azureus    5

Transmission    8

Qualitative Analysis    9

Conclusion    9

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.

Wii Numbers

Nintendo is a company whose purpose is to design and build so-called family friendly games and gaming systems. Ease of use is paramount in being family friendly. Something that Nintendo has been quite good at for some time. They have, however, made a grave mistake in their “Wii Number” and “Friend Code” system.

In order to play games with friends on the Nintendo Wii system you must first share your “Wii Number” with them. They will have to register it and you will also need to share their “Wii Number” with you too. It would be less painful if it stopped there, unfortunately, you must also register each other “Friend Codes.” The friend codes are associated per game. So a minimum of 16 (Wii Number) + 12 (Friend Code) = 28 numbers are required to play with a friend on line.

This is an example of a monumental failure to uphold G.A. Miller’s item short-term memory capacity. They do try to make it easier by grouping it into four digit chunks; however, the sheer number of numbers required makes the aid nearly moot. Perhaps a system where only the “Wii Number” was required would be much easier to manage. Every other modern console does fine in a manner with a centralized code (or nickname) is used, why not the Wii? I say that Nintendo needs to simplify this number system if they intend on maintaining their ease of use for families.

iPhone UI

Much discussion about the lack of an expected affordance in the iPhone UI has gone around in circles in various on-line communities- where’s the copy and paste?

No doubt the iPhone has the most user friendly interface ever designed for any kind of Smartphone platform yet and the device is so highly regarded as an internet communicator yet to be missing such a simple feature is quite surprising. My first cell phone, a Samsung E715, had copy and paste. If I received a text message which contained something that I wanted to put in my address book I could. While convoluted in the process needed the functionality existed.

Apparently this is just an affordance that we’ve grown to expect in a device with functionality similar to our laptops, desktops, and other computer-like devices. There is a mock-up of how the design for copy-paste would work on iPhone. I completely agree with the original author’s work.

iPhone Copy and Paste by lonelysandwich

iPhone Copy and Paste from lonelysandwich on Vimeo.

Signal/Battery Strength

A great example of graphical coding which has grown into ubiquity is battery and signal strength bars which are present on nearly any device which requires radio contact or batteries to operate.

They are on nearly every cellular phone, they are seen on GPS devices, and they can be found on our laptops for their Wi-Fi strength. Their purpose is clear. They indicate how strong the connection between two radios is or how charged a battery is. Certainly obfuscated from their actual measurements in dBi or mV- they serve their purpose valiantly. We know what they mean and our expectations are generally accurate with the imagery given.

An example of my signal strength being quite poor, my Wi-Fi being decent, and my Battery being not quite full.

A quick look at the screenshot of my iPhone UI shows quickly how easy it is to read the graphical coding which has been used by Apple.

The battery and signal bars have been engraved in our minds though commercial advertisements and though our gadget-centric society. I’m glad to report that it’s a system that works and doesn’t require any obvious revising to make it better.

My HCI Notebook

Is virtually empty. I’ve written down a few things but mostly junk. I find it more useful to take pictures of things that are weird/good/interesting with my iPhone and reviewing the pictures later. I am definitely not a “write-it-down” kind of person and I really can’t get used to it.

Not all those pictures are mine and the video certainly isn’t. However the text is all mine so if you want to plagiarize me you’ll have to ask first. I will not be held responsible for your failing grades. Thanks.

“Listen attentively. You will come out ahead in the next few days.”
- Fortune Cookie