Draft specifications for OpenUsability.org

[Aaron J. Seigo]

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On February 29, 2004 08:17, Jan Muehlig wrote:
> http://www.linux-usability.de/download/Draft_OpenUsability.pdf

finally... comments from the New House of Aaron ;-)

i think it's generally in the right direction, read from both the perspective 
of a developer as well as someone who has been dabbling in usability for the 
last little while. some general comments:


"It is therefore important to frame strategies for integrating the software 
development process with the usability engineering process."

the only thing i'd add is "and vice versa" to the end. i believe it will 
require modifications in both processes to work properly. the new web portal 
being one of them for the usability process, for instance.


"1. Present OSS projects"

items 1a-1c do not, IMHO, fit well on a usability portal. they are maintained 
elsewhere already and trying to keep that information up to date on the 
usability portal would be a bear of a task and almost certainly fall out of 
sync with the current information. a simple link to the project's development 
website should be enough, i would think.


"2. Present usability experts"

for those who become involved with projects in 1, there should be a linkage on 
the usability portal pages to see which registered usability people are 
working with which projects currently. i'm sure that's implied in the rest of 
the document, but making it explicit in this section would be good?


"6b. Communication tools"

i wonder how these will integrate with existing project communication tools. 
how disconnected should the usability process be from the regular development 
process, when it's a per-project focus?


"Also, OSS projects may belong to a framework or a larger project (e.g. KDE"

i take this to mean, then, that individual applications (e.g. JuK or KWord) 
would get their own section on the web portal ... if so, then KDE itself 
would need an area on the portal as well, as our styleguides would be 
referenced by these applications, etc.


beyond this text, i think it would be important to pick a goal that can be 
achieved in a managablye timespan that would be of value to the project. for 
instance, KDE could use an updated UI Guidelines document. that's something 
perfect, IMO, for this project.

it can be accomplished in time for KDE4, is well needed and nobody else is 
really working on it. thoughts?

> Another issue is that the draft does not limit the scope to KDE, but to
> OSS. The reason why I think we should label it OpenUsability is that it
> is (again) more accessible for usability people (an alternative
> label/URL could be UseForge.org).

i don't think associating it with SourceForge in its name is a good idea. SF 
is not known for overwhelming production, open software (they use closed 
source software), or quality service.

> Nevertheless I think that KDE is (one of) the most active OSS projects
> with respect to usability. Hence I hope that KDE maintainers and the
> whole usability group of KDE take the platform as a neutral ground which
> can be easility integrated into KDE development.

as long as we can get the attention for KDE needed/desired from a usability 
perspective, i'm happy =)

- -- 
Aaron J. Seigo
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