Looking Back on Three Years of OpenUsability with Jan Mühlig

[Dot Stories]

URL: http://dot.kde.org/1164982554/

From: Scott Wheeler <wheeler at kde.org>
Dept: are-we-there-yet
Date: Friday 01/Dec/2006, @06:15

Looking Back on Three Years of OpenUsability with Jan Mühlig
============================================================

     Just following the recent World Usability Day
[http://www.worldusabilityday.org/] and a few months past the third
birthday of OpenUsability [http://www.openusability.org/] I took some
time to talk to Jan Mühlig, one of the OpenUsability founders and to get
an inside look at some of the history of the project, how it works from
the inside and some of the current direction.

                         OpenUsability Milestones
    *
           July 2003

           Relevantive KDE / Linux usability study published

    *
           August 2003

           OpenUsability founders at KDE World Conference

    *
           October 2003

           OpenUsability project started

    *
           May 2004

           Slashdot and similar news sites first pick up on
OpenUsability

    *
           June 2005

           First OpenUsability booth at LinuxTag, visit by German
Minister of
      Justice Brigitte Zypris

    *
           November 2005

           OpenUsability e.V. founded

    *
           December 2006

           OpenUsability begins cooperation with the Open Society
Institute to
      sponsor and mentor student usability projects


     Hi Jan  first I'd like to get a little background  could you tell
us where you're from, who you work for, where you live?

     I'm Jan Mühlig.  I was born 1971 in Reutlingen, in southern
Germany.  I studied sociologiy, ethnology and philosophy in Regensburg
(Germany), Mainz (Germany), Chicago (US) and Lausanne (Switzerland). 
I've been living in Berlin since 2000 and am currently the CEO of the
usability consulting firm relevantive [http://www.relevantive.com/],
which I founded.

     How did you get into usability  was that something that came while
you were studying?

     Not really.  I did user research during my studies (media
sociology), mostly dealing with TV and I did ethnology, which has a lot
to do with understanding others' behavior.  After my degree (MA) I
started working in an advertising agency where I projected TV audiences
for commercials.  Then, in 1999, I took a position as a marketing
manager at a big multimedia agency.  The problem there was that we made
a lot of interactive things, but many of them were crap because we never
took the users' perspective but just assumed that we knew what was best.
 A year later, after I quit that position (in the summer of 2000), I
decided to do exactly what was missing in my previous work.

     With the background I had from my studies it was not very
difficult.  I met a school friend who worked as an IT consultant and we
decided to found the company.  We still had a lot to learn.  In the end,
most of my usability knowledge I got from books and practical
experience.


  I. OPEN SOURCE MEETS USABILITY

     So, that's the beginning of Relevantive.  How did you move from
there to getting into the Open Source world?

     I played around a little with Mandrake around 2001, but I had no
special interest in OSS.  Then, in 2003, I had some arguments with Jutta
Horstmann, who claimed that Windows is not more usable than Linux.  In
order to settle that, we started a large usability study
[http://web.archive.org/web/20060208135328/http://www.linux-usability.de/download/linux_usability_report_en.pdf]
during which we  especially Jutta  got in contact with Eva Brucherseifer
who helped us to set up the testing machines with Linux / KDE.  We
published the study under a free license and when we presented first
results at LinuxTag [http://www.linuxtag.org/] in 2003 we got a lot of
different responses.  On the one hand we said Linux on the desktop can
be as usable as Windows, but you very much have to configure it and we
mentioned a lot of weaknesses.  We were invited to present our study at
the KDE world summit in Nove Hrady.
 [http://dot.kde.org/1061562947/]
     The reaction there and the interest in usability was very mixed. 
Some, like Daniel Molkentin, Cornelius Schumacher, Eva Brucherseifer and
a few others were very interested and wanted to know how to improve
usability in KDE.  At that time I understood very little about how
thinks were done in Open Source, and I saw that the infrastructure OSS
projects worked with weren't very suitable to usability work (mailing
lists, bug tracking, CVS).

     I also had the impression that it would be very difficult to get
usability folks to join OSS projects.  That's why we said we needed a
platform that actually interfaces usability and OSS development.  So
jutta started to set up GForge.  I knew from reading usabiliy mailing
lists (KDE) and from experiences during Akademy that it didn't make
sense to approach a developers and convince them of the benefits of
usability; I came to the conclusion that usability can only work if the
developers are ready to go for it, which is incidentally the same in the
commercial world.

     So we had three challenges:

    * Get developers interested in usability
    * Get usability people inside the projects
    * Get workflows, interfaces and resources between the two groups

     The interesting thing is that OSS developers identify much more
with the software they write, so many actually have a strong interest in
their software being usable because they like  happy users.  But I don't
actually believe that a majority of developers can become really
usability savvy  it takes time to learn it and actually you need some
distance.

 II. A PROJECT IS BORN

     So now we've got some of the background  the platform, the
motivation, some of the process  how and when did that all come together
to form OpenUsability?

     After Nove Hrady (Akademy 2003), the platform we developed was
financed by Relevantive and all efforts came from there.  But we didn't
want people asking, What is the real reason they're doing this?  We
wanted something with more credibility.  So even though the
OpenUsability project existed, we thought we'd be more sucessful by
formally being separate from Relevantive and on November 3 of last year,
we founded OpenUsability e.V.  Since it was not just a project, but a
real organization we had more options  the ability to take donations,
add new members, etc.

     Who's a part of OpenUsability  both in the early days as a project,
the founding, now?

     Jutta [http://weltraumsofa.de/] and I were the first, then when
Ellen [http://www.kdedevelopers.org/blog/931] joined Relevantive, she
did a lot both in her worktime as well as in her free time.  I organized
a periodic usability round table in Berlin and through that I had the
chance to convince more usability specialists to do things for OSS like
Björn Balazs [http://www.lazs.de/], or Peter Sikking
[http://www.mmiworks.net/eng/publications/blog.html].  Ellen had
contacts to the CCC [http://www.ccc.de/] people, like Sven Neumann
[http://svenfoo.geekheim.de/], for instance.  Since they were interested
in Open Source, Tina Trillitzsch [http://tina-t.blogspot.com/] and
Florian Gräsle [http://holehan.blogspot.com/] also did some work for
Relevantive.

     So are all of those guys from usability backgrounds?

     Except for Sven, the GIMP [http://www.gimp.org/] maintainer, all of
the others had some kind of professional or academic usability
background.


III. WORKING WITH OSS PROJECTS

     What are some of the other projects you have worked with at
OpenUsability?

     KDE PIM, though they're short on developers now.  Björn and Florian
worked on Kuroo [http://kuroo.org/], the Gentoo package manager.  Björn
also worked with TV-Browser; Ellen worked with Guidance (Kubuntu). 
Celeste and Ellen are very much involved with KDE Human Interface
Guidelines.  Katrin is helping out with Gallery, a web image gallery
presenter.

     How did those projects get in contact with OpenUsability?  Did the
developers approach OpenUsability?

     Yes, that's one of the main principles of OpenUsability: that
developers approach OpenUsability, mainly by registering their project
on openusability.org.  We also meet a lot of people at conferences and
try to get folks that are interested in usability to sign up too. 
That's what recently happened after a EuroOSCON presentation with a
radio server project Campware.org.
 [http://campware.org/]
     What is also important is that we prefer a small or local approach;
usability does not come necessarly from top down, but through developers
or projects working directly with usability specialists.  That's why a
project like OpenOffice somehow don't fit our approach as most decisions
there are done top-down.

     And what are the first steps?

     Ideally we'd start with a thorough analysis of the goals and try to
work out the best solution, but in practice, many developers come with a
question and a certain feeling that things could be made better. 
Unfortunately, a lot of this is in the form of What's the right way to
do... and on deeper inspection it points to a deeper problem rather than
a quick fix.

     In other cases, developers take themselves as the primary (or
ideal) user. If the usability specialist from OpenUsability sees this
and has no hard-data to base a recommendation on, a usability test (i.e.
confronting real users with the piece of software in a structured
manner) often helps, especially if no one has figured out what the user
actually needs, or how they use the program.

     Unfortunately usability tests are rather expensive; you need to
find people, usually pay them for coming, analyse the results, and so
on.

     So, that usually doesn't happen for OSS projects?  Or only in
special cases?

     Just like Open Source developers, our usability specialists also
contribute in their spare time or for fun, so we try to maximize their
efficiency.  Analytical methods often make more sense and in many cases
they're a prerequisite to doing tests anyway.  A lot of real user
testing would ideally be covered by universities, for instance as
student projects, since they often have resources for such.

     What other challenges do you tend to hit along the way?

     In the case of GIMP, for instance, one main challenge was to
identify what GIMP wants to be for the user, that is: what is the vision
behind the software?  That's difficult in OSS because a lot of software
was started because of a developer scratching an itch.  Evolution of OSS
projects mostly works through additions (of features, etc.), but rarely
are projects changed at the core after it's reached a certain size or
level of recognition.

     So, roughly speaking  how does that compare with non-community
projects that you've seen.  Is open usability a totally different world
or just a set of variations on the usual theme?

     It's a completely different world.  In most commercial projects
you're there (as the usability specialist) because marketing or product
management wants you there.  Commercial developers often hate you
because they think you make trouble and slow things down.  Also, in
commercial projects (like, let's say a corporate intranet), there are a
lot of politics, and usability only can change 5%.  In Open Source, you
are working directly with the developer and he is the one who decides. 
There is no management above, at least not in the community projects.

     So, if as a usability specialist you are trusted by the developer
you might have a big influence on the outcome  which is something
extremely gratifying but also a lot of responsibility.

     Also, in OSS you can see the effects almost immediately because of
the short release cycles, whereas in commercial projects the feedback
loop is very long.  This is pretty close to an ideal usability
engineering process where you have lots of feedback loops between
software and user and thus iteratively get better in small steps. 
That's just wishful thinking in commercial software development.

     What about the methods?

     The methods do not differ very much, but the communication channels
do because you rarely work locally together but rather instead
communicate by electronic means  IRC, mailing lists (usually poorly),
wikis and other colaboration platforms.  However, if you happen to sit
together with the developers you're working with you may be able to do a
lot work in short amount of time, like at Akademy, LinuxTag or similar
events.

     Trust also has a lot to do with it.  Usability input is not
comparable to code.  It is not as much objectively reproducible or
verifiable.  A project maintainer can't evalutate usability input in the
same way as he can evaluate code.  Instead, to some extend they must
trust the competency of the usability specialist.  There, meeting each
other face-to-face and really talking can change a lot.

     I think that's true in a lot of OSS.  It's easier to work with
people with faces.

     That's why I would love to see more usability specialists present 
let's say at Akademy.  You often have to meet the people before you are
not ignored in mailing lists anymore.


 IV. THE FUTURE

     Any other big things on the horizon?

     The Season of Usability, which Ellen initiated, which thusfar has
been very successful is a clear sign that we are on the right track. 
The other important thing coming up will be to launching the new
OpenUsability platform which should very much ease collaboration.  From
there we want to spread the word worldwide and get usability people in
every country to support Open Source projects.  We also want to get
universities to support Open Source projects in an educational setting
and on the other side to get companies to share their usability
knowledge and to open up the process  to make usability open.