Re: [Usability] Usability study for GNOME on netbooks?

[Stormy Peters <stormy gnome org>]

We could ask Novell if we could post results to betterdesktop.org ...

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 6:11 AM, Andreas Nilsson <nisses mail home se> wrote:

Allan Day wrote:

<snip>
On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 15:53 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote:
 

As many of you know, I'm interested in putting together a usability
study for GNOME on netbooks.

I've gotten a few quotes from usability companies/contractors and I've
gotten some interest from advisory board member companies.

However, I could use some help shaping up the study. I'm not a
usability expert, nor really a GNOME on netbook expert (just a user),
so I could use some help.

Things left to do:
   

</snip>

<snip>
 

- Figure out ways to keep costs low by involving volunteers, giving
things other than money to those that help (publicity, making all the
data public and accredited to the organization, ...)
   

</snip>

This is a good (and interesting) question to ask. In an ideal world,
third-party usability testing would form one part of a more general
usability effort which would make use of the resources that we already
have available. I say ideal, because it's important to be realistic
about what we can do.

Off the top of my head, I can think of a number sources of data which
could be combined in this more general effort:

* Volunteer run usability testing, using something like Pongo [1].
 

I had some loose idea about putting together a website where people could submit their videos that they did on their mother, friend, workmate, janitor or whatever (with permission from those of course). A bit like betterdesktop.org [1]
Would need some instructions and stuff to get people to get started, but it could be worth a shot.
I'll see if I can put something basic together during the weekend.

1. http://www.betterdesktop.org/wiki/index.php?title=Data

- Andreas