I am in my third week of my internship with Fedora, and I feel like I’m finally getting the hang of things. Coming into the internship, I was completely new to the Fedora and FOSS community so I’ve been learning a lot the past few weeks! So far I am enjoying it and am excited for the next few months.
For my internship, I am working with Mairin Duffy to create a usability test plan for the installation program for Fedora, called Anaconda. We are also working with Filip Kosik who will be testing the users at DevConf, a developers conference in the Czech Republic, in February. I am very excited about this because this is my first experience with user experience/interface design, which I have been very interested in, and am planning on pursuing a career in this realm after I graduate. It’s also exciting that I am writing a usability test plan that will be translated into Czech and it’ll be used in another county!
Now an update of what I’ve been working on.
Last week, I created a first draft of the Pre-Test Survey we will give to the users so we can find the ones with the correct profile and skill set needed to test what we need to. This was a little bit difficult for me to write because I don’t have any experience with any high-level storage and not much of a technical background. Mairin sent the draft of the survey off to the Anaconda developers for feedback, then we discussed all of their suggestions. Their feedback was very helpful because of their technical experience and knowledge! I made the changes accordingly, the second draft was sent off for feedback, and the only feedback we received were typographical suggestions. I made some minor changes to the format and the final draft was done! All of our documentation and the final survey can be found here.
This week we’re working on the usability test scripts. We have identified the type of users we need for testing and the 5 different use cases we will be testing. The use cases will be:
- Non-English/US Install
- Dual Boot Install
- Customized LVM Install
- Customized RAID Install
- Preserve /home directory
So far, writing the test scripts has been a little difficult for me since I have never written one before nor have I been through a usability test before. I am using a few books, the internet, and the help of Mairin to help me write the test scripts. The documentation throughout this process can be found here.
For being unsure of what to write in this blog post, I think I did pretty well. I’ll be posting my progress throughout the course of my internship to keep everyone posted on our progress!
-Stephanie
Stephanie Manuel 