Hi there everyone, its my first post here so I dont got a recognized "name" here (nor anywhere else i guess, but that's not the point). As someone noted before everyone starts as an anonymous - but not completely anonymous, so: My real name is - as written in the From-Header - Florian Ludwig, I'm studying computer science in northern Germany and if you search the internet for me you might find some stuff I wrote on some mailings lists but nothing on this list nor I wrote much on another gnome mailing list and I never did any gnome related work. I'm not a designer - just a user who cares about his everyday desktop and is interested in where this desktop is going. So I'm here :) I hope to be able to provide useful thoughts and help out here and there but I'm one (of this minority it seems) of those who are not employed to do so. Also I'm right now not sure how much of my spare time I can spent on this... Maybe I will be one of those introducing themselves and disappearing afterward without a trace, but lets not hope so. For my understanding I'll try to summarize the general steps needed to "do usability". Please correct me with everything I got wrong: 1. creating information 2. categorizing / collecting the information 3. evaluating the information (4. implementing it) 1. Creating Information There are lots of sources already out there, sources that created for gnome, like betterdesktop.org. There are places / third-parties collecting user information that wasn't created for GNOME usability related tasks but may be helpful, like brainstorm.ubuntu.com. But also there are not centrelied sources like this one: [0] http://contentconsumer.com/2008/04/27/is-ubuntu-useable-enough-for-my-girlfriend/ 2. categorizing / collecting the information As you might be interested in "how thing people about X" you have to collect and filter the information from the different sources and bring them to a more similar shape. If the data is just collected for your research, like for the betterdesktop.org people, you probably dont need this one. 3. evaluating the information While nearly everyone can help with the first to tasks for this you need smart, skilled and educated people. So there are rare people doing this. Getting the conclusions out of your head into exact, well written, understandable words might also be a task that sounds easier than it is. 4. implementing it Maybe not in scope of this mailing list but the work should not be unrecognized and should have some effect ;) As in (nearly) every project there are not enough people. Especially non-programmers are rare. But I think programmers and everyone also too can help out with the first to steps and put less work (and more motivation) on those doing the evaluating. One example of the ideas that pop up in my mind: I think you don't really need a mobile lab to do interviews / user-testing. I imagine a ready-to-user live cd (or vm image), you just put onto a random computer and sit someone matching some predefined conditions in front of it. Now the user gets some task to archive while the screen, all input devices, sound and maybe the users picture is recorded. Also between the tasks there should be some easy to evaluate questions (like "on a scalar between 0 (very hard) and 9 (very easy), how easy was it to....") The interviews can be done everywhere but should be collected in one central point in the end and be easily accessible to everyone interested. Thats something programmers - that are not so rare - can help with putting together, right? Having information like exact mouse path is nice to put some statistics together but do you think it would be actually helpful? Would the effort be worth it at all? Implementing something like silverbackapp (which would be really good to have on such a live-system) is a task you need programmers for and might helpful for everyone doing interviews. There are already other ways to do it with programs that are out there but I think it could be worse the effort having an easier workflow doing interviews and more raw-data (like mouse movement, keystrokes, ...). Such a project might attract some people participating here (programmers and non-programmers). This is just *one* idea what a usability-project could look like IMHO. I just think a project with different small tasks and an call for help might help involving more people. I myself will continue to study usability (meaning reading what i find) and hope to be useful in the future. Greetings, Florian Ludwig
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