Re: Betterdesktop.org

[Tuomas Kuosmanen <tigert novell com>]

On Wed, 2005-10-12 at 12:28 +0200, Alan McGinlay wrote:
> lo all, apologies if this has already been mentioned. Just found this
> news article about desktop usability studies performed by Novel:
> 
> http://news.com.com/2061-10795_3-5893239.html
> 
> Its quite an interesting article and links to this Novel/opensuse
> subproject: 
> 
> http://www.betterdesktop.org
> 
> It contains usability videos for download that are worth a look.
> 
> Once again, sorry if you already know about it, I'm new to the mailing
> list. :)

We actually announced it in the  Gnome Summit in Boston last weekend -
but I am pretty sure we have people on the list who were not there at
the time :) So thanks for the link.

One thing worth noting is that it is an ongoing project - and the site
is a bit under construction in that regard. When we discussed the
project in the Summit, some very good ideas came up, like a blog for new
videos and tests, with a RSS feed so people can keep up with what's
going on etc.. perhaps with comments so it can be more of a community
project to participate etc.. Good ideas are still welcome, we want to
improve our work and make it more useful for the community as well, not
just Novell.

Also, it would be interesting to do more usability testing during
conferences (ie, guadec, summit) in the future, so more developers can
become familiar with the practices (and we could test stuff on-site,
perhaps with the relevant hackers around to fix stuff as we find things
to improve - that would be cool)

Nothing beats the experience of actually seeing real users bang their
head against the concrete wall that we created :) It opens ones eyes.

Best,

//Tuomas