Microsoft is conducting a Usability study on their Redmond campus for front-end web developers. Our Researcher would like a segment of the participants to have experience with Drupal, and in-depth experience creating HTML and CSS.
We have a variety of time slots available for this research study and can be flexible with your schedule. Here are the nuts and bolts:
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Participants must be professional web developers experienced with Drupal, CSS, and HTML. Some SharePoint experience is helfpul.
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Participants must be US citizens or permanent residents with a social security number.
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The study will be conducted during the week of October 3rd, 2011 on the main Microsoft campus. We will be as flexible as possible with participants' schedules.
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The session will last four hours.
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All participants completing the research study will receive their choice of two Microsoft products from a list of current titles including:
- Visual Studio Professional 2010
- Office Professional 2010
- Windows 7 Professional
- Office:Mac 2011 Home & Business
- Project Professional 2010
- ..and many more
If you meet the criteria above and are interested in participating in this research study, please send an email titled 'Drupal' to andnic@microsoft.com. I also welcome any questions you may have about the specifics.
Comments
Open Source
I find it offensive that Microsoft would use this group to farther agenda.
I actually don't think it is
I actually don't think it is offensive at all. Andrew actually asked me and Jared before posting and both of us thought it was perfectly appropriate. I might not choose to use or advocate for proprietary software developed by Microsoft, but if they want to improve web usability, and want the opinion of drupalers in doing it, i see no problem.
It is also worth noting that Microsoft has been a sponsor of many drupal events, including some here in Seattle.
http://GregoryHeller.com
Interesting topic, I can see how this could raise some eyebrows?
I think it is important to consider both positions here, and before i begin i will admit i made the switch from .NET to Open Source a many years ago so that is more of where my core philosophy lies.
Drupal is built on the premise of freedom, being open and for me, most importantly being transparent, which i think is such a big part of why the platform has grown so much and done so well. However, it is also important to remember that Microsoft is a commercial entity with commercial interests at the end of the day. I think to say that they are trying to improve we usability out of the goodness of their hearts and betterment of the web as a whole, missed how non-compliant browsers like ie5, and a personal favorite of mine IE6 were for development in general and you can pick your own surveys but here is one just from a google search for "html 5 compliance" http://html5test.com/results.html on the current product line. To their credit they have made their browsers more user and developer friendly, which definitely reduced the number of sleepless nights debugging and writing hacks.
Perhaps the issue here is transparency. For me, sponsorship of events, and free software does not earn legitimacy if there is an underlying agenda. Instead the actions of the organization as a whole would be more beneficial in gaining the trust of the community.
Would it not be better to give some background of what the study is about, what the study entails, what the outcomes of the study will be and more importantly how that information will be used? If that is asking too much, then i would have to switch my view on the motives of such a study? To use the term, usability is a bit deceiving as it can become a fairly ambiguous. If it is going to benefit the Drupal and the community, perhaps it would be better to take some time and explain how? Maybe then there would be less resistance to something like this, as despite @DrupalJet negative comment ratings, his sentiments, perhaps not as negative would be shared by a majority of us Drupalers.
Will results be shared with
Will results be shared with the participants or, ideally, with the drupal community even? Crossposting this to the usability group, looks like an interesing opportunity.
Microsoft's usability
Microsoft's usability research results for an individual product or feature are not generally shared with participants. Much of the research we conduct is for unreleased products and the conclusions of the research may take weeks or months to be determined.
That is not to say that we never publish findings around usability topics. Many of our Researchers publish papers in usability publications and most are members of the Usability Professionals Assocation (UPA). http://www.upassoc.org.
Additionally, Microsoft Research (distinct from Microsoft User Research) also publishes on usability and many other topics:
http://research.microsoft.com/apps/dp/pu/publications.aspx#p=1&ps=36&so=...
Thanks for the comments and discussion. I appreciate the Drupal community's help for this research study.
Andrew Nickels
I'm not sure it matters what
I'm not sure it matters what the underlying agenda is. Whatever it is, you won't know if it has been publicly stated or not as whatever is said will be to further the agenda, one of those catch-22 things.
Take it as face value - they want to do a usability study, there's mention of Sharepoint and Drupal and they'll provide you with MS software for your time. I'd guess they want to improve Sharepoint by gaining insight from Drupal devs. If MS software is useful to you, then this seems like a good deal, MS Software for helping improve MS software, done.
The realist's approach
@uwguy I think that is the best way to approach it.
"Microsoft's usability research results for an individual product or feature are not generally shared with participants."
As noted before, I can say with this above statement, personally, we have diverged in terms of principles of software development, research and analysis. As much as i would appreciate the insights of the data to from the perspective of the researcher, there is a greater preference to allow contributors and others (like the usability group/team for Drupal) the opportunity to formulate their own conclusions from the data as well.
Software development is a competitive, expensive and valuable process which i understand, so best of luck, however, i don't think i would be partaking in this. Too ambiguous and no clear value on how it will benefit the Drupal community, but hopefully there will be further fruitful discussion on topics like this in the future.
I participated in the study
...and it was enlightening. I am of the mind that usability, as Asimov says about science, exists as a single light, and to brighten it anywhere is to brighten it everywhere. If what we've done as Drupal developers makes other software easier to use, I would count that as a Good Thing™.
Anyway, the experience was fun. You go in to a room and use Drupal. You talk about what you are doing and they watch and record. They ask questions about what you are doing. It's not stressful like a formal interview and at no time was any 'agenda' pushed. There are no wrong answers, so you just do what you do. All the questions were about Drupal and how I was using it. Really. At the end, they gave me a voucher for my pick from a range of Microsoft stuff, from hardware to XBox games to some of the more expensive software that they make. Not offensive in the least.
Just my $0.02...