As a follow-up to the previous post, we’d like to evaluate the usability of our screencasts systematically. We know we’re not the first (or ten-thousandth) people to want to do this, so I went looking for procedures we could borrow. The University of Maryland’s Questionnaire for User Interface Satisfaction (QUIS) looks like just what we need:

(QUIS) is a tool developed by a multi-disciplinary team of researchers in the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) at the University of Maryland at College Park. [It] was designed to assess users’ subjective satisfaction with specific aspects of the human-computer interface. The QUIS team successfully addressed the reliability and validity problems found in other satisfaction measures, creating a measure that is highly reliable across many types of interfaces.

Excellent! Until you click on the Licensing link, and discover that the questionnaire is $750 for commercial users and $200 for academics. *sigh*

In a discussion with Karen Reid yesterday about what should be in U of T’s second-year CS hardware course, I learned something about my own beliefs that I hadn’t realized before: I believe that in order to be a computer scientist, a person must know (or must once have known) how logic gates, cleverly combined, can do things like add numbers. I don’t know if it’s a holdover from my degree in engineering, or whether it’s a ghostly memory of the epiphany I had in Prof. Michael Levison’s CS210 class at Queen’s in 1981-82 when I suddenly understood how deterministic collections of circuits could make choices (i.e., execute ‘if’ statements). I doubt we’ll ever agree on a definition of what computer science is, but this, the idea that programs are data, trees & recursion, and how garbage-collected object-oriented languages actually work are all marked “must know” in my mind. What’s in that category in yours?

“Want to know if your ‘HTML application’ is part of the web? Link me into it. Not just link me to it; link me into it. Not just to the black-box frontpage. Link me to a piece of content. Show me that it can be crawled, show me that we can draw strands of silk between the resources presented in your app. That is the web: the beautiful interconnection of navigable content…”

— Ben Ward (via various)