OpenSource Usability Labs

I am very happy that our blog is now aggregated on planet KDE!

I am Björn, usability professional for more than 10 years and one of the founders of OpenUsability.org. I have been working in and with open source for a very long time now. Therefore I am very happy that we now found a way how we as a usability consulting company can actually contribute to KDE.

And this is what we are going to do first: We are supporting Nuno Pinhero and the other artists of KDE by measuring the quality or usability of the icons used in the oxygen icon set.We do this in order to continuously improve the quality of the standard icon set used for the KDE SC - and make KDE SC rock even more!

To achieve this goal we will need your help. We will regularly ask you to participate in a short icon test survey. We will try to keep all surveys shorter than 5 minutes, so it is not too much of a hassle for you. We plan to set up a new survey every 2-4 weeks. The first will start in the next couple of days.

Also I am personally interested in the intercultural quality of icons or, say it differently: the necessity to internationalize not only text, but icons as well. To achieve this we will on the long run need some people willing to help us translating the surveys. If you should be interested, please just send me a mail.

We are able to do what we do here, because we are running a service that helps developers to understand what their users actually want. Testing icons is only one part of the game - there are many more possibilities. We are - additionally to what we do with the artists team - very happy to support anyone from the KDE community in getting to know their users and develop even better products. Same as above: If you are interested, please send me a mail.

Tags: kde

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 6th, 2009 at 14:23 and is filed under kde. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.