"Understanding User Comfort" Client Guide
Quick Start Guide
The resources of typical desktop computers are
dramatically underutilized. This has lead to many proposals to
borrow (or even buy) these resources to help solve important scientific,
medical, and commercial problems that need all the resources they can
get. It has also led to proposals to replace desktop computers
with potentially far cheaper thin clients and shared computers. In
either case, an important concern is raised. If resources are
borrowed (or limited), then the computer will occasionally respond more
slowly for its user than is satisfactory; resource borrowing can
irritate the user.
How do we keep the user comfortable? The "Understanding User
Comfort" client is
designed to help us to understand how resource borrowing affects the
performance of a PC and thus the interactivity of the user, to find the
kinds and degrees of resource borrowing that are acceptable to users.
We appreciate your help!
What is expected from the users of the "Understanding User Comfort" client ?
A PC contains numerous resources (such as CPUs , memory, and disks) that can be used according to various profiles. The client emulates resource borrowing by using resources according to different profiles, which we refer to as testcases. When the resource borrowing described in a testcase occurs, it may start having some effects on user interactivity. This client allows you to express your discomfort with such effects.
The client runs in the background, running testcases occasionally, while you continue to use your computer as normal. If at any point you feel discomforted due to the computer's unexpected slowness, you should immediately express this feedback to the client, which will record this information and immediately stop any testcase it is running.
The feedback can be expressed in two ways:
a. By pressing a Hotkey, which can be configured in the Setup option of the client. See "Running for the first time" or "Interface Guide" on how to setup the hotkey.
b. By right-clicking on the Client icon located in the system tray.
Whenever you express feedback, a message flashes briefly, indicating that your feedback has been recorded. Capturing your feedback, and the context in which it occurs, is the key point of the client, and helps us to understand how resource borrowing affects the performance of PCs and the comfort of their users. The client will occasionally contact our server to perform a hotsync (see "Running for the first time" section for more explanation), during which it will transfer these results back to the server, where we will study them. .
The feedback message which flashes on expressing user feedback
If you left double click on the system tray icon, the application is restored to its window mode and you can access more options and see what is going on. Left click on the system tray icon for quick access to various options on the toolbar. Pease see the "Interface guide" section for more information, especially the section on "Manual Hotsync"
When you run the application for the first time, the following screen appears. Just follow the directions.
The following setup box appears after pressing OK, which displays some configurable parameters for the application.
The hotkey and the Group Id are important parameters and you should carefully choose these.
A Brief description of the above parameters is as follows:
Setting the hotkey
The hotkey should be convenient and remembered for later feedback. You can use any combination of Control, Shift and Alt along with another key. After choosing the hotkey, press the "Set Hotkey" button. If there is any conflict, the application will report back and you can try another hotkey combination. The option of using F11 as a hotkey is also provided to serve as an easy way to express feedback.
After you enter the setup information, the application does the following:
a. Collects some information about the system like Processor information, RAM size etc.
b. Creates a disk resource fie, which is used in the internal operation of the application. This takes a couple of minutes to complete.
After executing these steps, the application minimizes to the system tray and runs in the background. You can right click on the system tray icon to express discomfort feedback and double left click to restore the application to its window mode.
See the "How the application works" section for details about application operation.
In normal use, the client interface is simply the hot-key and the clickable tray icon. However, you can also maximize the client to see what it is doing. The main interface of the clients is as follows (with the important areas labeled, their explanation follows below) :
Here is a description of important parts of the interface:
1. Manual Hotsync
This allows you to transfer the feedback results to the server manually. Normally the application itself connects to the server at regular intervals. However, if you are connected only sometimes, you should do the manual hotsync , when you are online.
If there are any results pending, the hotsync button will be enabled and you can click on it to transfer the results and also fetch new testcases.
2. Toolbar
Toolbar contains useful options for the application. Information about the buttons is shown in the contextual help window, when the mouse is moved over the buttons.
1. Discomforted ! : Click this to express discomfort feedback, as discussed in the first section of this document.
2. Setup : Click this to enter setup and enter important configuration parameters.
3. Go to systray : Minimizes the application to the system tray. Right click on the systray icon to express discomfort feedback. If you left double click on the system tray icon, the application is restored to its window mode and you can access the interface of the application. Left click on the system tray icon for quick access to various options on the toolbar.
4. Pause: Pauses the application, disallowing it to run more testcases for the time being. You can pause if you don't want to use the application for some time. Press resume to resume later.
5.About: Shows the about Dialog. You can access the Project web site from here and also send feedback to the "Understanding User Comfort" Team via email.
6. Help: Click to open the help file.
7.Exit : Terminates the application.
3. Client log
This window shows a log of the activities of the client like running new testcases, doing a hotsync. If you see any report here, you can send us the report and inform us by email.
4. Contextual Help
You can move the mouse over any control and this window will give information about that control.
5. Resource Monitors
Resource monitors show the utilization of various resources of your PC. The client emulates resource borrowing on these resources and you can often see the testcases running by watching these monitors.
