University usability project for Plasma Active?

[Aaron J. Seigo]

On Saturday, December 1, 2012 23:52:39 Thomas Pfeiffer wrote:
> - 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

as Marco noted (and you seem to agree with as well), this can work if the 
efforts are well coordinated with the main project here. that should be easy to 
achieve as long as those involved are aware of this from the start and are 
given a useful introduction to the tools we use to collaborate.

the remaining issue would one of scope. the PA tablet interface is not up for 
general re-interpretation at this point, due to the amount of investment it 
took to get it this far and the dev resources we have at our disposal. put 
another way: a rewrite isn't going to happen; the fundamental underlying 
concepts (e.g. activities) are not going to be swapped out.

i also don't think there's a much benefit to be wrung out of Yet Another Review 
of the Main Shell relative to the gaps that exist elsewhere in the interface. 
putting effort where it will have the large impact while conserving development 
resources is of prime interest right now.

there are a large number of things that would benefit from this kind of work, 
however, and it isn't hard to find good topics at all. a lot of the 
applications and workflow could definitely be improved with usability rigor 
applied to them, and there are many applications that are left to be written 
for (or adapted to) touch.

so the collaboration needs to start right at the project definition stage. the 
existing project members obviously won't be assigning tasks or any such thing 
(or even veto'ing ideas), but we can provide input as to the received value 
for us implementors would be and our interest as well which may help decisions 
as so to what projects to take on and in what way.

to be clear: i don't think it can or should work like GSoC where we pick from 
amongst proposals; rather, we just need to be communicating from the very 
start to get the best results (e.g. implemented, beautiful interfaces that 
support great workflows)

if we can accomplish that, then i think this could be a great success.

-- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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