Integrating Usability and Software Engineering
Friday, March 7th, 2008 by Björn BalazsThe last two days I attended a workshop organised by the GI on the integration of usability engineering and software engineering. It was pretty interesting and I got a bundle of new ideas from it.
The focus of the workshop was mainly on the needs of commercial projects and how to support them with usability engineering. I was - of course - trying to add the OpenSource-Flavor to the discussions. But I assume that most of the participants rather thought of me as some strange fellow with crude ideas, adressing problems commercial, ClosedSource projects do not have.
On the other hand: I once more understood that OpenSource - or better: community driven projects have great potential of achieving an outstanding user-experience. We just have to find better ways how to integrate our community into the development of the OpenSource projects. OpenSource has always profited from the community. So far mainly because of technically gifted people contributing to the projects. If we find ways to activate the potential of the much greater number of “ordinary” users for optimizing the user-experience, we can not only produce software that has less bugs, but also software that is more usable.
Usability engineering methods are - at the moment - basically optimised for the needs of commercial software development. On the other hand, certain key-aspects of OpenSource development are ideal for usability engineering. “Release early and often” is just another form of prototyping - a key-element of the user-centered-design (UCD) process. Our communities already provide - sometime disturbingly honest - feedback to us: another key-element of the UCD process. We just do not know yet how to bundle and activate it for the further development.
