Article on Usability in Open Source

February 16th, 2008  | Categories: General, Open Source, Usability

An article I wrote for the Usability Professionals Associations’ (UPA) bi-monthly online newsletter, The UPA Voice, is now online. In it, I give the professional usability community an introduction to open source software and why it is a great community to participate in as a designer. I tend to do a lot of education and outreach of design to developers in open source software, but there needs to be more efforts in the other direction of contributors of open source software to designers.

Go on and read Usability in Open Source. It is a pretty general article, but I hope to do more open source education in the design world (as I do design education in the open source world) in the future.

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  1. Vadim P.
    February 17th, 2008 at 12:13
    Reply | Quote | #1

    Glad you’re doing this for KDE. Love their apps (and use them), but the “Desktop Enviroment” is not appealing/usable.

  2. tecnocratus
    February 18th, 2008 at 05:05
    Reply | Quote | #2

    Hello Celeste!

    I’m not sure if posting this stuff here is a good idea, but anyway, I thought it could help others in my situation to get quickstarted in HCI work.

    I’m a systems analyst with a fair amount of experience in web/UI design (alas, mostly eye-candy). I am looking for ways of learning and further experimenting with -real- usability and new HCI concepts.

    Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a great deal of literature or other resources to help newcomers get started (the few ones I have found in my country are mostly focused on praising a single concept, such as the (in)famous Raskin’s Cannon Cat). Apparently most of the usability experts out there are pretty much self-made.

    So I figured out the best way of learning was getting my hands “dirty” with the job, and, as you point out in your article, I feel that Open Source is a great ecosystem for that.

    So, to keep it short:

    - Could you recommend some books/papers/articles/seminars,…. on HCI or general human-machine interaction which are suitable for n00bs like me?

    - Are there any “junior” jobs in current FOSS desktops where I could get involved? I use and love KDE, and I think usability analysis could be most beneficial there, but I wouldn’t mind helping other projects - I don’t tend to make a religion of my desktop environment, really.

    Well, hope someone could aim a guiding light at me. Thanks to you all in advance and kudos for the great work you are doing!

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