Sonntag, 22. Juni 2014 von Björn Balazs und Heiko Tietze

Introduction

We have gone a long way with the redesign of the KDE Network Manager in the last year. While we are satisfied with the general UI approach we have found, we still need to actually sort the large amount of available details for individual networks into the UI. In order to find the right structure (e.g. which details should be presented together and how should the groups be labelled), we asked you to participate in an online card sorting of the details.

Results

Unlike a lot of studies before, for the first time, we did not get enough participants. In the mobile broadband study only 22 users participated (Wireless: 113, Wired: 96), while more than 29 answers would have been required for stable results in this study. Furthermore, we do have problems to understand the results and transform them into the desired structure for the UI. But take a look yourself:

To us it looks like the results are not consistent. E.g., take the Connection state: For wired connections it is close to speed and IP details, while for wireless connections it does not even get close to the IP details. It seems like participants use different grouping strategies, like label, technical background or other personal preferences. Statistical analysis unfortunately tends to cover such diverting reasons.

Giving this, we will not use the results any further – unless you see something in the data, we did not find. To have the chance to investigate the data, you can find the results here:

Next to the statistical analysis itself, you can also take a look at the captions participants entered for their respective groups. When doing so, please note that the tool counts individual words and not phrases, so ‚Device Details‘ gets an entry under ‚Details‘ and ‚Details‘.

Please use the comments to share your insights.