Robust Remixes

This week was mostly about testing: planning for user tests at the Science Center, bug fixing, and evaluating the goals we set for remixes.

I made a long list of test cases for remix, tag, and bookmark functionality. Throughout the week, I checked cases and made fixes when things crashed or didn't work as expected. It would be nice to expand the functional tests I wrote for remixes previously and the unit tests Mary wrote. More automated tests will probably be helpful for the future.

An important thing came out of testing. It has been a great way to evaluate if what we have built so far satisfies our intentions with remixes. Before we get remixes in front of users, I wanted to take a critical look.

We have some opportunities with bookmarking that we are not fully taking advantage of yet. First, before a user has bookmarked anything, we can display tutorial-like content in the Bookmarks tab. Early in our brainstorming, we were concerned that the connection between bookmarks and the IDE was not visible. Key ideas: purpose, motivation, connection

How else can we make bookmarks more effective? We're also re-raising some early ideas of marking and sorting bookmarks. For now, we are adding in a tag cloud to the set of bookmark remixes. That way, if a user comes back to see bookmarks, they can dive into useful content for what they want to do. But, there's also the concern that tags might not be accomplishing everything we want. I've noticed that as I tag remixes myself for testing, I tag what I see but not what else is possible. We don't only want tags to stating what a remix is apparently about, but also the potential it has for broader applications.