OpenSource Usability Labs

LinuxTag 2010, anybody?

We invite you to take part in an informal meeting to share thoughts, experiences and other information covering the topics Usability and User Experience in the Free Software world. The meeting is organized by Björn from OpenUsability.org and Christoph from the OpenOffice.org User Experience Team.

You should join if you are interested in:

• Integrating User Centered Development into the development of your FOSS project
• Wanting to add your UX expertize to a FOSS project
• Wondering how to take benefits out of community work with real users
• Some usability tips for your FOSS project
• …

We are looking forward to see you at LinuxTag in Berlin, Germany!

Go ahead and find more information on the Informal Meeting Wiki page.

Cheers,
Björn

Today I found an article by Sam Dean who asks for a Centralized, State-of-the-Art Open Source Usability Lab. He refers to a cnet article by Matt Asay in which he postulates what Open Source can learn from Apple. Both articles point out that there is need for a shifting view in Open Source. Open Source needs to be more user-driven and less developer-centric - in other words there is a need for usability in Open Source work.

Well, there are good and bad news for both of them:
It is not as easy as they think but we have already come much further than they think!

To explain this I would like to clarify some myths on Open Source Usability:

Usability plays no role in Open Source development.

The OpenUsability.org initiative has provided Usability guidance to hundreds of Open Source projects for more than 5 years. We have worked with various  projects from big ones like Wikipedia or KDE to very small ones. Many projects have developed their own Usability-Community like the OpenOffice Renaissance or the KDE Usability project. Celeste Paul - one of the members of OpenUsability and KDE Usability - has just recently been elected into the KDE e.V. board.

So there is a community willing to assist Open Source projects on the user front and their work is been widely accepted.

Additionally our service, the OpenSource Usability Labs,  provides professional usability support to commercial Open-Source projects and traditional usability companys have detected Open-Source as a market by now.

Commercial Software always has a better Usability than Open Source Software.

First of all: the quality in commercial software varies as much as in open source. There are products with excellent usability around and there is just the opposite. In both cases the bad products die sooner or later.

So what we need to think about is: “What is possible for Usability in Open Source development?”

There are numerous Open Source projects around that provide excellent usability. Firefox challenges the Microsoft Internet Explorer. Think of projects like gallery, KDE4 or Tine2.0. All have undergone rewrites in order to enhance their usability and all have proven to be successful in relation to the age of the project.

So there is prove that Open Source projects are capable of a really good user experience.

Open-source software ends up being written for other developers.

This argument used to be true. Back in those good old days Open Source was successful, because developers could directly influence and change the software. If the software did not match their needs, they simply took the code and changed whatever they did not like. Projects split up, died, new ones were started - they evoluted. And by this they also evoluted a perfect usability - perfect for software developers which happened to be the main target group. In other words: those products evoluted perfect usability.

Nowadays that the user-base shifts, the goals in development differentiate. Projects that need to be used by average Joes and Janes build up user-feedback channels, integrate usability experts into the development and do regular user testing. They get designed for the average Joes and Janes.

Usability is a matter of a centralized lab.

This is actually not a special Open Source myth, but it is nevertheless wrong. Good usability can only be reached through a user-centric development process. A lab can be very handy during this process, but it is not the backbone. Usability experts need to be tightly integrated into the processes - from the definition of requirements, the evaluation of user goal, setting the information architecture to actually testing the products.

This is possible even in those distributed  and self-motivated development-teams you usually find in Open-Source projects. By tying it all into a single, centralized lab, as Sam Dean suggests, you would loose the strengths of this distributed development - just think of the requirements arising from different cultural needs.

Even more: Open-Source software is much more capable to integrate their users then a single lab would allow. Our experience is that Open-Source user are very willing to give feedback to the developers. While customers of commercial projects often ask: “What do I get, when I contribute?”, Open-Source users feel it is a good chance to say “Thank you” to the developers for providing a great piece of software.

By collaborating via the Internet it is not only a dream to activate this potential - it is reality. For example, we have just started an Icon Usability-Test for the new Oxygen k3b-Icons and we got more then 2000 participants within just 2 days.

Summing it up

The evolutionary process that stands behind Open Source development has already adopted to the idea of user centric development. Just as it will adopt to any other upcoming need in software development. And Usability on the other hand has started to understand the needs and the potentials of the Open Source idea, and makes great advances in activating them for the good of the projects.

For sure we are just at the beginning of a long journey. But we are already on the road. Articles like the ones from Sam and Matt show the increasing public demand for more usable Open Source products. I am sure the community notices these signals and will just speed up. The foundations are being laid…

Good news for all students of usability, user-interface design, interaction design,…: The initiative Open Usability has started the call for participation for the Season of Usability 2009 (a very big THANK YOU to Celeste for organizing and finding sponsors!!!).

The Season of Usability provides students the opportunity to practice what they have learned in university on a real Free/Libre/Open-source software project. The list of projects this year is great again:

• Amarok
• Drupal
• Gallery
• GeneMANIA
• Ubuntu - GNOME User Management Tool
• Kadu
• KOrganizer
• OLM
• SemNotes
• KUbuntu Add/Remove… Software

Of course I will again work as a usability-mentor for the SoU 2009. This year I am mentor for the Gallery project. This project is interested in learning more about its users. Project activities will include user research activities such as surveys, interviews, creating user groups and personas, and competitive analysis.

I will be really enjoying this job, as we have worked hard on our survey-platform Icon Test and the connected questionnaire methods. They will be of great use for the student and the gallery project.

Are any of those projects interesting for you? Then don’t hesitate to apply.

Today I did an update of my mythbuntu media PC to intrepid. I don’t want to update my working computer, but I was very curious because of the new features of Kubuntu intrepid. Along with other improvements you can read there:

“A new desktop needs a new package manager, Adept 3 fulfills that need.”

The first time I read this, I thought: “Wow, they have seen that Adept 2 was not working well - they have done it better now!”. But after testing it today I must conclude, it is new. But that is about the only positive thing to say about it.

Ok, I try to be fair, because I know how difficult it is to create a really good interface. And, hey the first glance of it is pretty good, I like the accordeon-style and I am great fan of interactions working with a filter-list-approach. It looks a little unfinished. This is ok however, as mornfall states in his blog that Adept 3 is still beta.

But as soon as I started interacting with the gui, the problems began.

Where in Adept 2 I could easily filter packages I now had to interact with icons of unclear meaning. While I was totally confused about what I saw, I decided to first adjust my repositories. Luckily this dialogue stayed basically the same as in the version before. While the package-list was refreshed the screen started bouncing, because progress kept bars pop-up and down. I saw that retrieval of some of my repositories failed. But I could see which ones, because the output just kept running - and disappeared from this as soon as all repositories we up to date.

So now I wanted to check what was installed, what has to be updated or removed and take the appropriate action. But Adept really made it hard for me. Entering a filter-string brought up an alphabetical list of all packages that were somehow related to the string I was entering. So entering “myth”, lets you scroll through all packages from “a” to “m” to finally check the state of some core mythtv packages.

When I want to remove a package, I have to first find it in the list, then open it in the list and then - finally check a box. This is at least one more step then in Adept 2. Multiple selection and manipulation of packages seems to be missing…

As I said, this written under my first impressions of Adept 3. Perhaps I will be more gracious once I have used it a while. But I am personally disappointed about the state Adept is in - especially compared to existing package-gui solutions (e.g. the gentoo portage-GUI kuroo, whose development I was allowed participate) and to the state it in was before. This does not mean I thought Adept 2 was a good program. It was the best for KDE and I had to make peace with it. But creating Adept 3 and loosing from low level seems to me incomprehensible.

I hope that a central project, as it is Adept for Kubuntu, is willing to accept support. There are many opportunities for willing OpenSource Projects:

• Mark Shuttleworth has started an initiative to increase the usability KUbuntu
• Open Usability tries to help out
• If it is only for the Icons: Contact us and we help you testing your icons.

And as I have worked a lot on concepts for package management in the kuroo project, I would be delighted to contribute to the Adept project as well.

Now I go back to my media PC and hope that Kubuntu intrepid is a little more, than only new.