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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Fwd: Open source usability question
From:       Liam Smit <smitty () absamail ! co ! za>
Date:       2004-07-01 18:28:51
Message-ID: 20040701202851.54cde206.smitty () absamail ! co ! za
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> > > Do you know of any organization or individual, academic or
> > > otherwise, engaged in conducting systematic, ongoing, and rigorous
> > > usability testing/research specifically on free or open source
> > > software?
> >
> > http://openusability.org/

If you expand your question to include community, then you could include
kde usabilty similarly Gnome also has a usability project.

If you relax the systematic, ongoing and rigorous usability testing /
research criteria then you will find lots of research / testing projects.
e.g thre were recently some enquiries on this list by some Italian
students iirc.

I have read quite a few OSS usabilty studies that have been conducted
in a once off fashion.

But don't let this stop you. If you can get funding to conduct some
"systematic, ongoing, and rigorous usability testing/research" on OSS then
go for it. I'm sure you could help a lot with kde usability. 

You could evaluate the advice that gets given on the list, or evaluate the
programs concerned before and after their usability makeovers, or develop
a method of evaluating a program for usabilty and how to give good
usability feedback to the programmers / interface designers. Note
usability guidelines for various OSS projects do exist but you could look
at these first and suggest imrovements or use them as starting point.

There are certainly big possibilities both from a pure research point of
view and in actually improving OSS programs' usability.

Liam
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