SCENARIO-BASED CLAIMS ANALYSIS OF MOOSBURG
SCENARIO 7
Ron is a MOOsburg user for two weeks. He is familiar with the basic ways to communicate within MOOsburg like talking and paging someone. Now he wants to send an email to one of his friend from MOOsburg. He looks in the help screen and found the "@send" command. He types it with a valid email address. Then he types a subject. Now he types the first line but an error appears "I don't understand that". He thinks that maybe he should use the quotes. Now he types line after line. He realizes that he is in the "Mail Room" as written in the main frame. He can see the subject-line but not the content of his mail. He still wants to send the mail so he tries some commands like "@send", "@end" and finally "@quit". Now he is not anymore logged into MOOsburg. He isn't very happy but logs in again. On the main frame he can read his mail: he is still in the mail room. Now the content of the mail is visible. He uses the help command. In the help, he has to go to mail then to editors (without link between them). He has a list of commands without real help so he tries "done". The new message is that he should come back later to finish his letter. Now the text message is "do a look command to get the list of commands (in the telnet frame). He types look and a list of commands appears. He types "send" and it works. Ron thinks that this is a very complicated way to send an email and decides not to use this function anymore.
CLAIMS ANALYSIS OF SCENARIO 7
- The use of the "@send" and "send" commands :
... can be found logical because the "@" means that a new MOO command will be executed, and without the "@", the command has only a local effect.
... but the first command "@send" is really confusing: in almost every mail software, a command like "new mail" is used to create a new mail. The meaning of the word and its effect are in conflict here.
... but their use makes the mail feature of MOOsburg as hard as doing a telnet session directly on the MAIL server.
- The Web frame in the mailroom:
... helps the user understand that some new commands are available. He knows that he is doing something special.
... displays the email title and content. This is a good feedback because the editor is only a line editor.
... but the web frame is not updated: the user cannot see the text of his email without doing something else like stopping writing the mail and starting it again.
- The help about the mails:
... is better than nothing.
... comes after typing the "@send" command but scrolls and thus is not visible enough .
... but is not complete. Using the help available from the help icon is not easy here. A simple example should be available.
It seems to be almost impossible for a novice user to send an email in MOOsburg. A simple "mailto:xxx@yyy.zzz" link would be easier to use. The user would have to use his/her own mail program and would not have to learn anything new.
