University usability project for Plasma Active?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 03.12.2012 10:45, Marco Martin wrote:
> 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)

Absolutely, this would not be something to start - let alone finish - 
anytime soon.

>> 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

Yes, that's what "difficulties in communication/coordination" referred 
to ;) I know that just "throwing something over the fence" won't produce 
useful results. Plus, the experience for us and our students would be a 
lot more interesting if we cooperated more directly.
I'd consider such a project a success for KDE/Plasma Active if:
- we get useful results for PA out of it
- people from our institute found it so interesting that they'd like to 
continue working with PA/KDE (we need more UX experts anyway).

The second point would mean a success for our institute as well, the 
other criterion for us would of course be publishable results.