<snip> On Wed, 2009-04-22 at 15:53 -0600, Stormy Peters wrote: > As many of you know, I'm interested in putting together a usability > study for GNOME on netbooks. > > I've gotten a few quotes from usability companies/contractors and I've > gotten some interest from advisory board member companies. > > However, I could use some help shaping up the study. I'm not a > usability expert, nor really a GNOME on netbook expert (just a user), > so I could use some help. > > Things left to do: </snip>
<snip> > - Figure out ways to keep costs low by involving volunteers, giving > things other than money to those that help (publicity, making all the > data public and accredited to the organization, ...) </snip> This is a good (and interesting) question to ask. In an ideal world, third-party usability testing would form one part of a more general usability effort which would make use of the resources that we already have available. I say ideal, because it's important to be realistic about what we can do. Off the top of my head, I can think of a number sources of data which could be combined in this more general effort: * Bug data - an important resource for assessing and researching usability. Is it possible to extract and summarise usability bugs relating to netbooks? * Volunteer run usability testing, using something like Pongo [1]. * Evidence that has already fed into the GNOME 3.0 design effort, particularly from the City of Largo [2]. * Existing expertise and analysis from designers and developers, particularly those involved in the GNOME 3.0 effort. Here I agree with Paul - a good focus would be to test and develop the design ideas around 3.0 [3, 4]. * Evidence and ideas from Ubuntu Brainstorm (and other similar projects) [5]. Assembling, summarising and synthesising all this data is a big job, but it *might* be doable. Such an exercise would help frame and define the aims of a third party usability project. Just my two cents... Best, Allan --- aday on irc.gnome.org [1] http://live.gnome.org/Pongo [2] http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest/CityOfLargoPresentation, [3] http://live.gnome.org/ThreePointZero/Plan [4] http://live.gnome.org/Boston2008/GUIHackfest?action=AttachFile&do=view&target=organise_presentation.pdf [5] http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/?keywords=netbook&tags= _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
