University usability project for Plasma Active?

[Thomas Pfeiffer]

On 03.12.2012 14:03, Marco Martin wrote:
> On Monday 03 December 2012, Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
>> 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)
>
> one thing that could work, is to identificate together with them what are the
> still "unsolved issues", and there are still clearly a few (the still open
> points about the filemenager come to mind, among the several).
> So the work would concentrate on those.

Okay, I think there are two possible kinds of collaboration: One is 
small student projects as part of usability / UX courses. These would 
work well to solve the specific interaction problems we face as their 
purpose would be to teach students to do usability work.

Another thing I had in mind would be a big - ideally externally funded - 
research project (similar to the project which funded the initial work 
by basyskom on recommendations and other parts of PA).
And though the intention of such a project would definitely _not_ be to 
recreate the whole PA UI or feature-set (for the reasons Aaron stated, 
plus the fact that PA simply doesn't need a complete makeover, the 
general principles work just fine), the scope of such a project would 
have to be bigger than solving specific design issues.

One example that may be big enough for a scientific project are security 
features. I think one reason why we have not continued working on them 
yet and private Activities are still disabled at this point is that we 
were not able to come up with a solution we were really happy with yet 
(and we are quite perfectionistic ;) ).
That doesn't mean security is not important, and having good security 
and privacy features is still something that would set PA apart from the 
big players in the tablet market.
And security/privacy research is likely to get funded especially in 
Germany / the EU.

General guidelines for converting desktop (mouse & keyboard optimized) 
applications to touch-friendly ones is also something that may be big 
enough and the differences between keyboard/mouse and touch would be 
scientifically interesting.

A big scientific project should of course also produce outcomes that are 
generalizable beyond PA.

Of course we would not launch such a project without your consent and 
cooperation, either.