[Usability] Draft of usability team update Q2 '09

[Calum Benson <Calum Benson Sun COM>]

Stormy's asked the various GNOME teams to start preparing quarterly  
reports, and I've been asked to put together the usability team report  
for Q2'09 (March-June).

Here's what I have so far, but I'm sure I must have forgotten loads of  
things-- what else should be on the list?  Feedback by Thursday 30th  
July, please.

* Work continues apace on GNOME Shell user interface prototypes and  
improvements, in preparation for a preview release alongside GNOME 2.28.
<http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/DesignerPlayground/>
<http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/>

* Allan Day continues to work on analysis for potential redesign of  
tabbed applications and GNOME's tab widget: <http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/TabImplementation 
>

* Allan also wrote a tutorial on usability testing with Pongo, a screen 
+webcam recording app (written by Andreas Nilsson) that's useful for  
doing usability studies: <http://live.gnome.org/Pongo/Tutorial>

* Anton Kerezov carried out an online survey of GNOME user  
demographics and basic desktop usage.  He had over 1000 responses,  
primarily from people GNOME mailing lists, and the data is presented  
and analysed at <http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/UsabilityTests/GnomeGeneralResearch 
>

* Canonical's Design and User Experience team launched the Hundred  
Paper Cuts project, to identify 100 trivially easy-to-fix bugs that  
the average user would encounter on their first day of using a brand  
new installation of Ubuntu:  <https://launchpad.net/hundredpapercuts>
	
Thanks,
Calum.

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

Any opinions are personal and not necessarily those of Sun Microsystems