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List:       kde-usability
Subject:    Re: Usability Bugs and.....?
From:       "Jennifer E Jobst" <jobst () us ! ibm ! com>
Date:       2001-09-04 15:14:50
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Hi Robert et al,

What you're describing is User-Centered Design, or UCD.  You're right in
saying that usability studies shouldn't just be *re*active, but they should
be *pro*active.  This means that developers should start thinking about
usability from the design stages, rather than developing something and
*then* testing it to find the problem areas.   There's a decent UCD site at
http://www-3.ibm.com/ibm/easy/eou_ext.nsf/Publish/570 (and no, nobody paid
me to say that!) ;)  There's also plenty of books on the subject, including
Jacob Neilsen's Usability Engineering.

User-centered design requires a lot of working with developers early on.
There are task analyses and prototypes to be done, before anybody ever sits
down to write code.  One of the hardest parts of UCD is convincing people
that this early work (which may delay the date that they actually get to
sit down and write code) is useful and will actually save them time in the
long run.  In the real world, I know from experience that this is a hard
thing to do.  In open source, where development times are even faster, it
may be even more difficult.  People (and not just developers!) usually just
want to jump in and start something - planning is sometimes optional!

I like Jono's vision of what's to come with the KDE usability.  I think
that we've already got the test suite stuff going.  The key is really going
to be how to involve the developers.  Initially, we might want to try doing
this with a few developers who are into usability, and our success with
them can help build us a "good name," as well as giving us experience doing
UCD in an open-source environment.  Ideally, at some point in the future,
each new KDE project will have a usability person working with the
developers.

Perhaps a good starting point would be some "developer liasons" - usability
people who know KDE developers and can con them into working with us on
usability.  I dunno... anybody got any ideas of where to start?

-j





                    Robert Watkins

                    <robert_maria@yahoo.co       To:
kde-usability@mail.kde.org
                    m>                           cc:

                    Sent by:                     Subject:     Usability
Bugs and.....?
                    kde-usability-admin@ma

                    il.kde.org



                    08/24/2001 06:13 AM

                    Please respond to

                    kde-usability






When I created the Usability Report for KPlato, I
was struck by the fact that the reports are
designed solely to be bug reports. This bothers
me.

Usability needs to be on the front-end of
development and not just the back-end. It is not
a User Acceptance Test type of activity, it is an
activity that starts during requirements
gathering.

Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself because I know
that introducing Usability into any development
environment is difficult. I'm just afraid that
we'll give the wrong impression that bug tracking
is all that Usability is good for.

I think some of the efforts on doing a study with
users is a good idea, but we need to introduce
the topic of Usability to the developers so that
they understand and apprecite the benefits of
this aspect of application development.

Am I off base?

Robert Watkins

=====


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