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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    usability sprint at SF
From:       Jan Muehlig <jan.muehlig () relevantive ! de>
Date:       2005-02-24 19:37:05
Message-ID: 421E2CE1.2060304 () relevantive ! de
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As it happened, I attended the FLOSS usability sprint in San Francisco 
last weekend.

There were about 40 participants, amongst which were 6 or 8 usability 
people (including me) and open source developers. All in all it was a 
very interesting happening, although the projects present were rather 
web based (have a look at http://www.flossusability.org/wiki.pl?FrontPage).

The basic idea was to gather OSS projects and usability people together 
and to improve the applications during this time, thus having a 
before/after (this is my impression which may differ from others). If 
only code were touched, hack fest or coding marathon would be the 
analogy. Here were really excellent usability people (excluding me, of 
course), like the head of ui of oracle, Luke Kowalski, or Peter Trudelle 
from Mozilla (have a look at 
http://www.iol.ie/~calum/chi2002/peter_trudelle.txt).

This idea was really great, although a lot of time was lost by 
understanding what the problems really were. I guess next time this will 
be dealt with in advance.

Since most developers of the projects involved were paid, they do not 
reflect typical OSS projects in their broad range. However, there were 
some very interesting outcomes that may be generalized to OSS usability, 
and useful for KDE. I hope to find the peace to write about this in the 
next days. Also, a lot of resources will be bundled, like methods, 
check-lists and so on, and availabe.

Concluding, I consider it a great idea to do such a sprint. I am very 
much looking forward to Malaga ... perhaps there will be more outcome 
and action than in Ludwigsburg.

Jan



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