Re: [Usability] an open source usability community

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

On Sat, 2003-10-25 at 22:50, Joseph Monti wrote:

> The other is to make it more of a group; smaller, more organized, and
> who work together more closely. 

This isn't really a million miles from what the GUP was originally
intended to be... we even used to have regular(ish) meetings and
everything, but they weren't a resounding success :/

> One thing I was thinking is to have this
> group "certify" a project usable. This can be much more constructive
> and beneficial to the community.

Unfortunately the only group of people who can ever really declare a
product usable or not are its users :)  A group of people who are
familiar with basic usability principles/guidelines can certainly pick
out a lot of potential problems by doing heuristic evaluations etc., but
actual problems have a habit of only showing up in usability studies. 
(Of course, it would be great if the group you envision was able to
organise and run such meaningful studies-- you don't need big bucks and
a usability lab to run a good usability test.)

Incidentally, in the aftermath of the CHI2002 workshop/BOF that was
organised by a few of the GUP folks
(developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/articles/chi2002.html), a mailing list
was set up to discuss how the usability and open source communities
might work together better... it's depressingly quiet most of the time,
but if anyone wants to subscribe and stir it up a bit, drop a note to
the list admin (who is currently either Seth or nancy frishberg sun com,
I forget which...)

Cheeri,
Calum.

-- 
CALUM BENSON, Usability Engineer       Sun Microsystems Ireland
mailto:calum benson sun com            GNOME Desktop Group
http://ie.sun.com                      +353 1 819 9771

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems