User-based Testing Expected for digiKam and Ubiquity
(I had been hoping to post about my next KDE App of the Day, but this seems more important…)
The KDE and K/Ubuntu communities have been given an incredible opportunity! My department at the University of Baltimore has its own usability lab which is used for classes and research projects. Every spring semester, graduate students of the Research Methods class has the opportunity to conduct usability testing as an educational activity. I have arranged to have user-based testing on both digiKam and ubiquity (the installation process for Ubuntu and Kubuntu) conducted for the small cost of participant stipends.
digiKam is an incredible photo management tool as well as have an incredible community of developers who are dedicated to their users. Its functionalities include being able to interface with your camera, organize your digital photos, and make simple edits to make them better. I call it the next amaroK for photos. It isn’t without its flaws, but the developers are very anxious to get feedback on how they can make improvements.
Ubiquity is the name given to the installation process on both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. In addition to examining the process itself, we will also be investigating how well participants understand concepts such as a “Live CD” and identify any problems which may occur because of it. This is a great way to help make installing the distribution for humanity even easier.
We will be recruiting 9 participants for each project and testing is slated to start at the beginning of April with results available in the beginning of May.
seele :: Mar.14.2007 :: General, KDE/Kubuntu, Usability :: 9 Comments »
Cool as nice as Digikam is (I use it all the time) it does need some usability fine tuning….
Please test the newest possible version 0.9.1 or even 0.9.2svn to avoid “discovering” old problems.
This is great news. Digikam is one of my favorite programs. I do a lot of photography, and I use Digikam all the time. It’s great already, but anything that can make it better is welcome.
This is wonderful. I’m actually the most interested in Ubiquity and the LiveCD concept. I would think that users would embrace the concept and think it was really cool, but it’ll be nice to see how normal people really react to it.
Great news! Way to go!
Great ! Digikam is my main and favorite app for digital pictures. It have now more features than anything else (in the free software world). With the addition of some tools for very precise actions (gimp, lightzone, hugin) it’s a wonderful environment for Linux photographs. However there are still a few GUI choices that I like, e.g., in Picasa, that I would like to have the possibility to have in Digikam, like the editor opening in the same window, not a new one, the use of the mouse wheel, etc.
Good luck with the studies that hopefully will bring us some even better digikam future versions. Good choice for the tool ! :-)
Cheers,
Christophe.
= I hate those people who say “I don’t know any programming, but it sounds easy, so why don’t you just add [impossible feature like time travel]?” =
We’ve talked about this on IRC of course, but as the lead Ubiquity developer I’d just like to say publicly how excellent it is to have proper usability research focused on it. It hasn’t exactly been developed in a vacuum, and it had UI attention paid to it from fairly early on, but I’m quite sure that a study such as this will turn up new and interesting points.
Developing Ubiquity is an interesting exercise in balancing (sometimes non-obvious) technical requirements with ease of use, and sometimes in coping with difficult temporary technical limitations too. Even the page ordering is a surprisingly delicate compromise (language has to be asked first, we need to know the country early on so that we can choose a good default keyboard layout, migration has to be done after partitioning so that we don’t try to migrate from partitions that are going to be wiped before migration can start, etc.). At some point I should sit down and try to write down all the compromises in one place for posterity.
I don’t know if I fall within your participant requirements, but if so, I’d be interested in being a usability guinea pig.
And as the person to blame for Ubiquity’s interface design, I’ll second everything Colin said. :-) I’ve always been uncomfortable designing things without the benefit of early usability testing, and I look forward to my silly mistakes being revealed.
With regard to the “Live CD” in general, I see that the 6.10 CD jacket gives no explanation of what a live CD actually is. Ouch. (I would have used the term “Test Drive” instead.)