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The KDE Usability Project will be hosting an HCI Workshop during the 2008 Akademy. The workshop will take place on Wednesday, August 13. There will be many sessions covering all types of HCI topics as well as an interactive workshop at the end of the day.

Agenda:

Welcome to KDE HCI Day
Lead by Celeste Lyn Paul and Ellen Reitmayr
A welcome to KDE HCI Day and review of the day’s activities.

Design Research Methods
Lead by Celeste Lyn Paul
Usability is not just about testing. There are all types of research methods designers use to create usable interfaces, some that include participation by users and others that do not. In this session, we will review the different type of research activities and how the results feed back in to design and development. There will also be an opportunity to ask questions to find out which research activities are right for your project.

User Groups and Personas
Lead by Ellen Reitmayr
Lack of user research is one of the primary reasons usability in open source software is so hard to achieve. Learn about the importance of defining user groups and creating personas and how it can improve your project’s usability by helping developers understand their users. After a short introduction on user groups and personas, this session will be a hands-on activity where developers can ask questions specific to their projects and users and get help creating user groups and personas for use in their project’s KDE User Research Profile.

HCI Concepts of the Plasma Desktop
Lead by Aaron Seigo
This session will talk about current HCI issues and future goals of the Plasma Desktop, including discussion on interaction concepts such as zooming user interfaces (ZUIs), passive configuration, and direct manipulation, as well Plasma and its use across the device spectrum.

KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines
Lead by KDE Usability Project Members and Season of Usability Interns
During the past summer, 2 Season of Usability interns helped us create patterns and guidelines for the KDE4 Human Interface Guidelines. In this session we will review notable changes between KDE3 and KDE4, review new guidelines and patterns, and discuss samples of HIG violations and their fixes. A question and answer session will follow for developers to ask specific questions about the guidelines and how they might apply to UI problems they are working on. More involved questions or design problems may be discussed during the KDE4 Open UI Workshop.

KDE4 Open UI Workshop
Lead by KDE Usability Project Members
This is an open discussion period for KDE4 HIG- and UI-related issues. Developers should come prepared with questions and sample screenshots (website links or USB key) to discuss and get assistance. Benefit from other developers’ questions and participate in the discussion.