obso1337.org

Many of you may have heard about Canonical’s new 100 papercuts project (more info). The goal is to fix 100 minor usability bugs for the Karmic release. Although the primary focus is Ubuntu, Kubuntu can benefit from this program as well.

A papercut is easy to fix, will improve the user experience for a lot of users, and is present in Kubuntu Jaunty 9.10. For example, a papercut could be improving a bad label or icon, fixing a HIG violation, or rearranging a configuration dialog to make more sense, A papercut is not a new feature request or change requiring more than a few likes of code.

Papercuts are like fleas on a dog. A single flea is no big deal, but many fleas are quite annoying. The more papercuts we fix, the greater the effect on the overall Kubuntu experience.

We need users to find and report minor usability bugs to Launchpad and assign them to the hundredpapercuts project. Attention Non-Kubuntu Users: Keep in mind that Kubuntu papercuts are often also KDE papercuts. Even if you do not use Kubuntu, voting on Kubuntu papercuts in Launchpad can benefit all KDE users. Much of Kubuntu’s development work is contributed upstream to KDE. Papercuts we fix for Karmic could potentially show up in KDE 4.4! Just log into Launchpad and import a KDE bug and assign it to the hundredpapercuts project.

Time is running out to submit papercuts. So this weekend, I encourage everyone to take a few minutes this weekend to think of one usability papercut that has been bothering you and report it. When you find or submit a bug, click on “Also affects project”, specify hundredpapercuts as the project, and click Continue.

I’ve started a wiki page to keep track of some my papercut ideas for Karmic, but not all of them have been submitted as bugs yet.

This past week, I attended Open Source Systems 2009 in Skövde, Sweden. Academics from around the world came to talk about their research in open source software, discussing topics ranging from architecture to commercial use and adoption to user involvement.

It was very strange for me to be there from the KDE project, because although many of the researchers there were knowledgeable about open source, very few of them actually participated in the community. Many attendees were looking in at open source from the outside. In many respects this is necessary in order to remain objective about the subject you are studying and to prevent your involvement to have an effect on the subject. Some were interested in open source and how they can improve it, but others were interested in open source simply because it offers an easy source of research data such as SVN logs or open mailing lists.

This was also my first academic conference since beginning my PhD and it was very valuable to speak with other PhD students there about their experiences. In addition to a number of interesting people I met and talked with, I finally got to meet Paula Bach who has done some incredibly interesting work regarding computer supported cooperative work (cscw) in user experience and open source. Oh yes, the ever charming Paul was there as well. I’m sure we will see some interesting stories regarding pretzels sometime soon.

Names are so fun. Our little group for the week consisted of C Paul, Paula B, Paul A as well as Andrea C and Andrea W. By the end of most nights, I think most people’s names changed to You.

I was also an author of a paper and gave a presentation (although I ran over as usual). I surveyed case studies written by usability practitioners in open source and described some of the more interesting results. One of the most interesting findings was the discussion of user research in all of the case studies reviewed. User research (or the lack thereof) had a great impact on the success of a usability initiative — either because the product wasn’t designed with users in mind, and in some cases the lack of user research hindered usability specialists from doing their job.

The conference proceedings are available through Springer. I’m not sure what their pre-print policy is, but once I find out hopefully I can provide a draft of the paper. Otherwise, slides from the presentation are also available:

Survey of Usability Practices in Free/Libre/Open Source Software presented at OSS 2009 (PDF 365KB)

Flight reservations? Check. US to EU Power adapter? Check. SPF 70 Sunscreen? Check. The Gran Canaria Desktop Summit is a month away. Are you ready? See you there!

On Saturday during the Cross-Desktop session, I will be participating in the Lightning Talks and will try to dump as much useful information about community-based usability testing onto you as I can.

On Sunday during the Akademy session, I will talk about Communicating Design in Development. There are a number of ways developers try to explain new user interface ideas to the community: ACII art, scanned napkin drawings, Qt designer mockups, annotated screenshots, etc. Some of these methods get the message across better than others. When you try to add details such multiple states, interaction, or animation effects, an image which was meant to help could end up confusing your audience even more. As a designer, I am often asked which tools I use in order to create mockups or annotate existing user interfaces. Although there are some specialized tools for interaction design, the tools I use the most are every day open source software. There are many tips and tricks on how to use these tools to convey user interface ideas. This presentation will explain how to use common open source tools to more effectively communicate your design ideas to the community.

This month’s KDE Usability Project meeting was held May 13 at 20:00 UTC in #kde-usability. The IRC meeting logs are also available on the wiki.

The next meeting is TBA, but will probably be sometime during the week of June 21 2009. We will probably cover a few meeting topics and spend the rest of the time talking about Akademy. Post your meeting topics on the meeting page or come prepared to share screenshots.

Summary of Discussion

• Flyser brought up an issue with the KGet icon and how to indicate progress. Notmart and Pinheiro lead the discussion and Pinheiro will mockup some alternative icons.
• We reviewed Half-Left’s mockup for Appearance Settings. He collected our feedback and will make some adjustments.
• Discussed creating a guideline for indicating the Get Hot New Stuff button. Different applications use different labels and we want a consistent way to icon and label the button. Seele will look into creating a guideline.
• We reviewed Chani’s mockup for configuring mouse actions on the desktop. She collected our feedback and will make some adjustments.

This past weekend, the Amarok team met to talk about the road map for 2.1.x and 2.2. They also discussed the findings from the usability test and plan to implement many of the recommendation from the report.

See the 2009 Sprint Roadmap and TODO (particularly the usability section for 2.1.x) for more details of what’s to come for Amarok!

Thanks again to the Columbia Area Linux Users Group and Maryland Ubuntu Local Community for their help with organizing and running the usability test.