Hi there -- I don't post much here, but I was the programmer on the Multimedia Usability Project, which primarily focused on making uploads easier. The outside funding for that project just ended, so I think it's a good time to talk about what (if anything) we will do in the future along these lines.
Going forward, we ought not to think about usability as the responsibility a few people in San Francisco. I have been asking myself how we could end the need for usability projects, and instead make that part of everyone's practices. What makes you a usability engineer? My personal belief is that it isn't (primarily) a matter of having special knowledge. You become a usability software engineer when you see five average users utterly fail to accomplish the task you wanted them to be able to accomplish. Programming is a hubristic enterprise, but for UI, these negative feelings are essential: watching ordinary users get angry and frustrated dealing with what you've created, even feeling a certain shame and embarassment that you got it so wrong. Only then do you see how large the conceptual gap is between you and the average user -- but you also usually come out of the experience with an immediate understanding of how to fix things. So is there a way to have *everybody* who develops software for end users in our community have that experience? Maybe. At the WMF, for these Usability Projects, we had to do formal studies with expert consultants, because these were grant-funded projects and we needed to present scientific data. Doing those studies is expensive and time-consuming. But as a developer, it was more valuable to do "hallway usability testing" in an informal way. There are lots of startups these days that try to deliver such lightweight user testing over the web; could we do the same? Or, possibly we don't even need software; maybe what we need is a tradition of doing this for everything we release. So how about that? If there were an easy way to integrate usability testing into your process as a developer, would you be interested? And what should that look like? -- Neil Kandalgaonkar ( <ne...@wikimedia.org> _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
