"Easy to use, ready to use"

• By Ramon Chen, Director Products, Synon Inc.

  In creating Obsydian, Synon crafted an extremely powerful, state of the art development tool. The power and flexibility of the tool is depicted by the myriad of options and functions at the disposal of the Obsydian developer.

  A wise person once said "With such power comes great responsibility".

  Through feedback received on the Obsydian focus groups (see "Staying Focused" Synonyms Summer 1996), Synon has acknowledged that there are many enhancements we can make to the Obsydian user interface which will improve the ease of use and raise developer productivity levels to even greater heights.

  In addition to the excellent feedback from the focus groups, which we are in the process of reviewing, we also enlisted the help of Human Factors International, Inc. (HFI). HFI’s sole focus is to help companies create successful products by applying software ergonomics to their user interface design. They do expert reviews and usability testing as well as designing user interface architectures and developing corporate interface standards.

  HFI’s mission was to review Obsydian’s user interface and to provide recommendations which we could incorporate immediately into the product. Their bigger mandate was helping us to shape and define the next generation interface which we are planning for Obsydian 3.0.

  Many of the reviewed items matched closely the feedback we had received from you. Items such as creating a mechanism for doing both a Retrieve Catalog and full extract at the same time, or providing the capability to remove triples from editors where they are added featured prominently in the HFI review.

  What was especially interesting, and rewarding, to me was that some of their recommendations had already been put in place with the latest version of Obsydian 2.14. Features such as, allowing the same panel property of more than one element to be changed at the same time, and the ability to use a Find capability in the Action Diagrammer, regardless of whether the action diagram had been expanded, showed us that we were already on the right track.

  We are actively taking HFI’s recommendations and your feedback in order to bring to you the next generation interface for Obsydian. We are confident that you will find Obsydian Release 3.0, "Easy to use, ready to use".

Human Factors International Inc. are based in Fairfield, IA.
They can be reached at (515) 472-4480.