University usability project for Plasma Active?

[Marco Martin]

On Saturday 01 December 2012, Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> Hey everyone,
> as most of you probably know, I'm currently working at the Institute of
> Ergonomics Darmstadt and I'm part of the usability group there.
> Now I had the idea to do a science project with KDE and since Plasma Active
> is my "main project" within KDE at the moment, I'd prefer to do something
> for PA. Before I think more specifically about what could be an
> interesting project, I'd first like to ask if you would like to cooperate
> with an academic institution.
> We are a group of usability experts and visual/interaction designers, so
> things we could do include:
> - Doing formal usability testing (including eye tracking) with more than my
> usual handful of participants
> - Tackling complex UI design problems
> - Providing more general research-based guidelines
> - Inventing new interaction paradigms

This could be interesting
I see it quite as a long term project (probably not much we could implement 
now) but given the timeframe a thing like that will be completed, timing could 
be perfect (pa5/pa6 or so i guess)

> What we can't do is code, so we'd have to rely on you to implement things.
> Of course we can't force you to implement anything, but if nothing we come
> up with gets implemented in the end, this would of course be rather
> frustrating ;)
> 
> KDE's experience with academia has been rather mixed in the past mostly due
> to difficulties in communication/coordination, but since I'm part of both
> the core PA team and of the institution, I think we have an opportunity to
> make such a collaboration a success for both sides.

one factor i think, is that i remember in the past it was mostly a relation 
delivered in the end (at least this happened for an old study adout the web 
browser) without any interaction at all during the study. And this tend to 
produce stuff not overly useful.

If we could have direct interaction with some of the students involved, would 
probably produce way more useful results


Cheers,
Marco Martin