usability review
Usability tests with a friendly user have revealed severe issues with installing and using Wallabako. Here are the issues we found.
-
there's no "Download" button that the user can just follow to get the software. (fixed!)
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users do not read the documentation, because it's a wall of text. We need a simple step-by-step procedure to help people deploy that thing on their devices. (fixed!)
-
instructions for copying the file in place were incorrectly telling the user to put the file at the toplevel directory when the file needs to be in the
.kobo
subdirectory. the screenshot provided still shows that mistake. (fixed!) -
the instructions to edit the file also didn't work because the user used their usual text editor (LibreOffice) to create the
.wallabako.js
file and, when the.txt
format was chosen, the file created was actually.wallabako.js.txt
, even though the user properly entered the filename. This is arguably a bug in LibreOffice, but we can't expect users to workaround that on their own. -
the configuration file written by LibreOffice was not recognized as the JSON parser would crash on the BOM marker inserted at the beginning of the file. (fixed!)
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the user had to be told to connect the reader back to see what was happening - they didn't find the logfile on their own. (fixed!)
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user attempted to tap the "Sync" button on the homepage to sync articles, which fails because that doesn't trigger wallabako
Proposed solutions:
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file a bug against Gitlab to allow hotlinking to latest release. workaround: make a website with a hand-crafted linkthere is such a link already, and it works great:https://gitlab.com/anarcat/wallabako/builds/artifacts/master/file/build/KoboRoot.tgz?job=compile
master
can be replaced by a tag name and that also works. filed a MR to document this -
make a separate website on Gitlab pages or Readthedocs with a simple splash page and step-by-step instructions, hard-linking to the released version if necessary. see #21 for followup. -
instructions already fixed to mention the .kobo
directory, need to fix screenshot as well. -
possibly write an installer that will generate the config file for the user, using a simple (even if commandline) question/answer dialog to download relevant files, create config files, copy it in place and so on. (#10) -
what the fuck, seriously. fixed the parser to ignore BOM markers. telling users to "use a proper editor" sounds more like evangelism than a usability fix. providing a template file (instead of copy-pasting) might be a good workaround as well, but for now that should do it. -
make the logfile visible from the e-reader, by using a .txt
(works, and done!) or.html
(to be tested) extension -
research the "Sync" button to see if it triggers something we can hook into, see if there's answers to this post or post a new question elsewhere... update: there's no good builtin way still, but there's a NickelDBus that offers triggers, which we could hook into if installed
We could draw on the framebuffer as well with:
https://wiki.mobileread.com/wiki/Kobo_WiFi_Hacking#Drawing_to_the_Wifi.27s_framebuffer
This guy really hacked the hell out of the Kobo, going as far as coding Qt stuff...
http://blog.ringerc.id.au/search/label/kobo
Update: we implemented on-screen display with fbink, see #49 (closed), released in 1.5.0.