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Conclusion

The high response rate to the survey demonstrates a strong interest in and commitment to VMD, among those downloading the software. The survey reveals that while our users are satisfied with the software, they are concerned primarily with functionality and ease of use. Ratings of desirable features reaffirm our development directions and provide insight into future needs. Focussing in the past 10 months on porting VMD to Windows and anticipating friendliness and affordability as the main challenges for the next 12 months appear to correspond to our users' preferences.

The quality assurance of our of software requires active contributions from our users. The participation of and frequent feedback received from Resource members and other users have been an invaluable correction mechanism in the development process of VMD. We are convinced that to remain effective, all future development and dissemination efforts will have to rely on the broad input from the user community at large. Recent changes made to the VMD registration form and on the VMD web page enact this philosophy by urging our users to express their suggestions and ideas in a clear and loud voice. We would like to be able to consider our users as partial VMD developers and intend to treat them as such. By delivering speedy and powerful responses to users' concerns, comments and perceptions we hope to better support our user base, to further improve our software tools, and to inspire a long term relationship with VMD users.

Last but not least, we strive to make VMD a prime example of the term `Calm Computing' coined by the late Mark Weiser who, for the past 10 years, was the Chief technologist at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. Dr. Weiser perceived future computing as so simple that technology would recede into the background and stop interfering with our lives. This notion is applicable to scientific computing as well, and is a basic tenet guiding our development process and shaping our products, however complex they may be. It is our long-lasting mission to establish VMD as a sophisticated yet common graphics technology for specialists and non-specialists alike, designed to be easily used and manipulated on affordable desktop computers.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to David Budescu for his help with the statistical analysis and interpretation of the results.

The comments and suggestions contributed by our users made this a better report, and we are grateful for their input.


next up previous contents
Next: Figures Up: No Title Previous: Discussion of Results

John Stone
Mon May 24 11:10:57 CDT 1999