The Effects of Active and Passive CD Retention Features on CD-Rom Drive Usability

Abstract

Servers that can be mounted either vertically or horizontally should optimally allow the CD-ROM drive to be oriented horizontally in both scenarios. However, some systems do not allow this flexibility due to the constraints of the mechanical package. A usability test was performed to compare 5 different CD-ROM drive designs placed in servers that can be either mounted horizontally in a rack or vertically as a tower. This work was performed to determine the drive(s), which would minimize the risk of dropped CDs while in a vertical orientation while still being easy to use in both orientations. Twelve subjects participated in the study, 6 human factors engineers and 6 engineers of various disciplines, all working at IBM. The tasks tested were simple CD insertion and removal tasks with the drives mounted in tower and rack configurations. Subjects gave preference rankings and ratings on various usability aspects such as ease of insertion, ease of removal, and the perceived risk of dropping CDs. The results showed that, within the given constraints of these systems and IBM manufacturing processes, the drives which require the user to activate the CD retention feature exhibited significantly lower usability ratings than the drives which required no extra steps. Also, these drives yielded more jammed and dropped CDs than the drives with active retention features due to the users' lack of activating the active retention features correctly. Lastly, the findings showed that human factors engineers tended to be more conservative on these ratings than the non-HF engineers, though these differences were not statistically significant.