Since the fall quarter of last year, HCI student and Ubiquity community contributor Zac Lym has been doing good work testing Ubiquity on new users. Although the study included only a small number of users, it’s an important one since it’s the first and only rigorously derived usability data we have on Ubiquity. The users in this study had no prior exposure to or preconceptions about the Ubiquity interface, and the experimenter gave them no help using it; so the problems and frustrations they encounter give us insight about the specific areas where Ubiquity needs improvement in discoverability and learnability.

The primary material resulting from the research is a series of videos of users in action. Zac has made these videos available on the Mozilla wiki along with write-ups of his methodology and his findings. These findings are well worth reading in full for anyone interested in improving the Ubiquity user experience.

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