[AusNOG] Networking professionals required for usability trials of “L3DGEWorld”

[Warren Harrop]

> On 2/25/08, Warren Harrop <wharrop at room52.net> wrote:
>> Who we need:
>> Ultimately we're looking to test a range of people, from networking
>> professionals through to non-networking professionals but at the current
>> time we are just seeking a range of people with some form of network
>> administration experience.

Narelle wrote:
> Is this where I grumble that these things are never tested on a range of users?
> 
> That usability in network management systems is rarely ever considered?
> 
> That once again, it sounds like something novel is being tested on
> wasp males in a specific age group???
> 
> Oh gee. What a surprise. Yes fellas, there are women, old people,
> ethnics, that operate networks quite effectively. Not to mention the
> growing numbers in offshore monitoring centres.
> 
> The more diverse your test cases and test subjects, the more likely it
> is you will pick up the bugs.

Agreed, I just realised that the sentence above is rather clumsy. The
line "from networking professionals through to non-networking
professionals" in my head was the boolean expression:

"from (networking professionals) through to !(networking professionals)"
  i.e. ("everyone else")

When I put it on the page it created the odd sentence above that could
easily be read as:

"...through to ((!networking) but-still-professionals)".

To add a little to my last post, locating participants in the "everyone
else" group is currently easily served by a sort of six-degrees
friends-of-friends recruitment method. It's the 'some form of networking
experience' group I was hoping to mine AusNOG list readers for.

Having said that however, I am looking for a wide diversity of people.
If an ISP group had say, help-desk staff (minor to medium network
admin exp.), people who eat BGP feeds for breakfast (high level of admin
exp.) and office-admin staff (zero to very little admin exp.) - I'd be
very interested in testing the system with all of them (time permitting).

The reason that I'm testing a range of people is that one of the overall
research questions I'm attempting to answer goes along the lines of: Can
raw network metrics be presented as objects in a virtual world, in a
manner that is meaningful even to people with no (or little) networking
experience?
eg:
"Hmmm...those stars in this virtual world are now jumping and spinning
quickly - at the same time as these pyramid objects way over there
started jumping in succession...I don't know what exactly is going on in 
this network, but these events are clearly linked and something is up..."

Warren Harrop