HI Bob, I'm resubmitting my note... I'm planning to be up your way to speak at IBM on Sept 19-20 - coordinated by John Karat. best wishes... -- Ben S -------------- User Frustration Data Collection I am seeking your help in a short-term research project to assess the degree of and situations that cause frustration among users of commercial software tools. Anecdotes and strong public statements have produced a lively controversy, so now it would be useful to report scientifically on user experiences. This evidence would identify the severity of the problem (or lack of it) and then serve as a guide for product improvements and research agendas. Just as airlines report delayed and cancelled flights, the software industry might provide consumers with accurate information about software problems. If you have collected data in your organization from logs of user activities or surveys and interviews with users, please share what you can from these sources. The kinds of information I think would be useful are frequencies, circumstances and costs (time and money) due to: - crashes that terminate programs and lose data - inability to figure out how to accomplish an intended task - confusion with dialog boxes, instructions or help - need for users to obtain human assistance - incompatible file formats and failed conversions - failure to open attachments to email - incompatible hardware, software, networks - incomplete facilities for disabled user access - inadequate universal usability design I will collect your responses and prepare a report for general use. I would appreciate comments by September 30, so that a report could be prepared for distribution at the ACM Conference on Universal Usability, November 16-17, 2000 (www.acm.org/sigchi/cuu/) Ben Shneiderman www.cs.umd.edu/~ben Dept of Computer Science 301-405-2680 University of Maryland 301-405-6707 fax College Park, MD 20742 www.cs.umd.edu/hcil