Interesting essay on usability in OSS projects

Christian Stimming stimming@tuhh.de
Fri, 06 Dec 2002 11:50:07 +0100


Chris Lyttle wrote:

> http://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~daven/docs/oss-wp.html


This is an incredible good paper explaining the usability issues 
specific to open source projects. Let me quote their final conclusion:

 > Raymond (1998) proposed that 'given enough eyeballs all bugs are
 > shallow.' For seeing usability bugs, the traditional open source
 > community may comprise the wrong kind of eyeballs. However it may be
 > that by encouraging greater involvement of usability experts and end
 > users it is the case that: given enough user experience reports all
 > usability issues are shallow. By further engaging typical users into
 > the development process OSS projects can create a networked
 > development community that can do for usability what it has already
 > done for functionality and reliability.

Also, they mention a bunch of nice ideas to do automated remote 
usability testing / user feedback. E.g. the 'expectation agent': "When a 
user does something unexpected [by the developers] (and triggers the 
expectation agent) program state information is collected and sent back 
to the developers." Well. Maybe during the 1.8 cycle we find some 
opportunity to attract more Usability designer guys -- or maybe some 
from us are able to provide more user feedback for GUI suggestions. I'd 
certainly be open for that.

Christian

PS: I just realized we already have had several of these discussions, 
the last being about the generic importer discussion. Which was good, 
but I'll probably wait until we got 1.8 out until I'll revisit the 
importer GUI, due to coding time constraints...