| Title: | Online Bookbuilding |
| Notice: | This conference is write-locked: see note 1.3. |
| Moderator: | VAXUUM::UTT |
| Created: | Fri Aug 12 1988 |
| Last Modified: | Mon Jul 15 1991 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 440 |
| Total number of notes: | 2134 |
A not-quite crazy idea proposed by one of my engineering colleagues: If you want to know how people use documentation, get someone to instrument the bookreader software so that it tells you: - what text is referenced, in what order [so you can plan hardcopy better] - what text is referenced repeatedly by the same user [indicates bad text?!] If this were done, you could couple it with a trial at DEC and/or customer sites. At last, A/D for the writing group....!! Judy P.
| T.R | Title | User | Personal Name | Date | Lines |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 349.1 | good idea | OLD::UTT | Mary Utt | Mon Jun 11 1990 11:59 | 14 |
Yes, we have talked about this and we could certainly get lots of metrics
about Bookreader usage. Again, lack of resources -- to make the changes
to Bookreader and to analyze the resulting data -- are the reasons we
have not done this.
(We did human factors testing on very early versions of the Bookreader
(under UIS -- I mean *early*!) and had logging built in to it so we
would have a record of exactly what the users did. Mostly it was
'page' turning, and we calculated reading speeds from the log
information.)
Thanks,
Mary
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| 349.2 | A suggestion: consider DECtrace | CRAYON::GENT | There is no poetry without madness -- Democritus | Mon Jun 11 1990 12:53 | 10 |
Hi Mary,
If you reconsider "logging" bookreader use, might I suggest looking
into DECTrace, a new product designed specifically to make
instrumentation and data analysis easier. DECtrace logging is
customizable at runtime (on/off, subsetting of activities being
logged, etc.) and DECtrace automatically logs 10 or more basic
system usage parameters (such as I/O and CPU usage).
--Andrew
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| 349.3 | another good idea | OLD::UTT | Mary Utt | Mon Jun 11 1990 14:57 | 4 |
Good point. Thanks, Andrew.
Mary
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