One of my classes this semester has to do with Usability Engineering. It’s a nice and informative class. It makes you see various applications and interfaces from a different point of view. I also had an assignment where I had to analyze the usability of an application. So me and my group decided to go with the well known Messenger from Microsoft. We picked up the latest version, which is now called ‘Windows Live Messenger’, and said what things are considered useful, usable, functional and what aren’t. To support our report we even created an online questionnaire and sent it to people from the University and also spammed a couple of forums The feedback we got was really amazing. In just one week we got 640 replies. From that questionnaire we got some really amazing results! Some of these were:

• A lot of people don’t use the default options (Tabs/Today window etc.) and they simply disable them
• Almost 40% signed up for hotmail.com just to use the Messenger. Why registering for another free email service when you can use your existing email?
• 30% is not having INTERNET EXPLORER as their default browser, but still when you try to check your email from the Messenger’s window, Microsoft forces you to use INTERNET EXPLORER
• 42% faced audio/video/connection problems when they tried to use these features

As you can see from a simple questionnaire we can get a lot of feedback from users. To be honest though, Windows Live Messenger is considered to be one of the easiest applications that MS produced. It’s colorful, easy to learn, easy to use and with a rather nice interface. Still though it needs some improvements. In our 20 page report we included those improvements along with many proposals that would make the software even more usable.

For this course we also had to prepare a poster presentation as well. Thank God for Photoshop! I think both poster presentation and overall report went good. In a couple of weeks I’ll know for sure!