But the hidden variables that you hypothesize here are precisely the type of information I would go to the IETF Web site to get rather than use a more reasonable source like Wikipedia.
In particular finding out what the latest version of a specification is. Telling people to plug 1724 into the RFC search engine to find the POP3 specification is to put it mildly 1) an arrogant waste of the readers time and 2) gives the wrong result.
I have been thinking quite a bit about usability in the past few weeks, in particular trying to work out how to codify some of the rules that Nielsen gives in his book in a form that is verifiable. One approach that does seem to be useful is to think in terms of task scenarios, similar to use cases but more concrete.
Just defining task scenarios is a big start. For the IETF Web site I would propose that we need to consider the following tasks (amongst others):
1) Find out the status of an IETF proposal or specification
2) Find the latest documents describing an IETF specification
3) Find out how to submit a proposal to the IETF
4) Find out a point of contact for a proposal or specification
We then look at the Web site to determine whether it meets the following rules:
1) Sufficiency of information - is there enough information to complete the specified task?
2) Complexity - how many steps does a task require? how much information must the user remember to complete it?
The IETF Web site is built to the old fallacy that minimizing the information provided to the user is the same thing as reducing complexity. That is utter B.S. The user gets confused and considers the problem complex because they have too little information or irrelevantinformation.
If you build out the state table for what the user is required to do in order to fulfill these simple tasks it quickly becomes apparent that
1) The user is required to know vast amounts of folklore. That is information that is not provided to the user.
2) The process is unnecessarily complex
3) Most of the useful information is not even present on the site anyway, the site you really want to go to is the tools site.
From: Harald Alvestrand [mailto:harald@xxxxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tue 22/01/2008 2:17 AM
To: Henrik Levkowetz
Cc: IETF Discussion; Willie Gillespie
Subject: Re: Finding information
Henrik Levkowetz skrev:
>
>
> On 2008-01-21 11:24 Stephane Bortzmeyer said the following:
>> On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 03:01:24AM -0800,
>> Tony Li <tli@xxxxxxxxx> wrote a message of 23 lines which said:
>>
>>> Or, you can google IMAP and come up with 3501 straight away...
>>
>> Bad idea. Not only it makes the RFC process depend on an external
>> organization, but it often fails for the reasons explained by the
>> OP. For instance, googling Sieve does not bring back RFC 5228...
>
> Submitting 'sieve' in the document search form on
> http://tools.ietf.org/html
> returns 3028 as the first result, and a link to the htmlized 3028
> which notes
> that it has been obsoleted by 5228. (I'm surprised that the search
> results
> doesn't already include 5228, too, but I expect they will fairly soon).
The sieve WG web page also doesn't list 5228 as a product, so I guess
some routine updates are on hold while the transition is taking place.
Harald
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