KGet Usability Review

The KGet download manager for KDE is being rewritten for the upcoming KDE 4.0 and its developers Urs Wolfer and Manolo Valdes were looking for someone to do a usability review of their work so far. Two KDE usability evaluators, Florian Graessle and Tina Trillitzsch, agreed to do a Heuristic Evaluation of KGet. Before the review, the reviewers researched the current user base of KGet and that of competing download managers and determined their goals and needs. Together with KGet’s developers, a target user base was defined and the reviewers created a number of frequent tasks to guide their evaluation. During the evaluation the reviewers went through the interface separately, with the help of a few common usability principles (“heuristics”), noting down any problems they perceived for potential users. Later they agreed on a severity rating for each issue and devised a suggestion to solve it. The results were put into a wiki and presented to the developers in KGet’s irc channel. The reviewers discussed the issues and suggestions with the developers, who then almost immediately began solving some issues, so that these could quickly be marked as solved in the wiki. Overall 37 usability issues were found, most of which have already been fixed.

The findings showed a lot of promise: the browser integration is very well executed and KGet often offers very good feedback when adding downloads. There are some very innovative ideas for finding files to download on a web page. Most negative issues were minor, and only really significant in the main window, especially concerning the presentation and management of download groups and download details.