Spotlight on Spotlight - Carol Smith Home Page

Smith 10
1. Functional Analysis
Users were asked to first browse the data set and examine individual documents, in order to
devise a broad range of retrieval tasks. These tasks were then executed freely using <strong>Spotlight</strong>,
in an effort to reveal functional challenges. Performance errors became apparent at a very
early stage:
Task #1 (User 1): Locate all documents authored by Verna Williams.
Error: During the browsing session, User 1 pre-determined that at least 5
individual documents existed in the data set with author listed as either
‘Verna’ or ‘Verna Williams’. When entering ‘Verna’, ‘Author: Verna’ or
‘Author: Verna Williams’ in the <strong>Spotlight</strong>, however, zero results were
retrieved. Similar retrieval failures were consistently experienced with other
devised user tasks.
Problem Source: Several hours of exploration and experimentation revealed
the reason for this performance failure. All 144 plain text files in the data set
were saved without the .txt extension added to the document name. Such file
extensions are necessary in a Windows environment, but are optional in Mac
operating systems. In order for <strong>Spotlight</strong> to index a plain text file, however,
the .txt file extension is apparently required. Although not necessarily a
functional error, it is one that conflicts with long-established system
behavior, and will inevitably cause confusion for Mac users.
Resolution: As soon as the extension was added to all text files in the data
set, User 1 was able to successfully execute all remaining functional retrieval
tasks.
Task #2 (User 2): Locate all documents mentioning the name “John”.
Error: During the browsing session, User 2 observed that John was a
common name listed in the message board postings, and was curious about
what percentage of documents contained this name. Even after the .txt
extension had been added to all plain text files in the document set, however,
User 2 was unable to execute the retrieval task, receiving a results set of zero
documents.
Problem Source: Again, exploration and experimentation led to an
understanding of the performance failure. Whereas User 1 was utilizing
<strong>Spotlight</strong> to conduct a system-wide search of the computer’s entire hard
drive, and then analyzing just those .txt files with the anticipated file name
formatting (001, 002, etc.), User 2 chose to access <strong>Spotlight</strong> via the system’s
Finder feature, specifying a focused search of just the Data Set folder. As
previously described, this folder contains six subfolders, and documents were
saved within those six subfolders. It was determined that when <strong>Spotlight</strong> is
directed to examine the contents of a particular folder, it analyzes folder