[Desktop_architects] Printing dialog and GNOME

Celeste (seele) Paul seele at obso1337.org
Tue Dec 13 06:48:18 PST 2005


Aaron J. Seigo wrote:
> <thread hijack!>
>
> as someone for whom usability is near and dear to his heart ... we need
> more
> than testing. betterdesktop.org has value, but we need the involvement and
> direction of usability expertise during development that has a wider scope
> than a specific product.

i agree.  user testing is only one of five methods for evaluating an
interface.  it is one of the most expensive methods, takes the longest,
and even then doesnt find all the problems which can be discovered in
other methods of testing.

there needs to be more initiative to integrate usability in to the
engineering lifecycle from gathering user requirements all the way down to
deployment and user satisfaction surveying.

> this is why i wanted openusability.org involved here, because they get
> these
> concepts in spades and work with the projects in the community directly
> during the development cycles. this is amazingly valuable.

(fyi Im the OU.o representative for this group)

> when we talk about common needs and common resources, which is the topic
> of
> our little group here =), it's easy to show how to get any open source
> project into the OpenUsability.org process and how any project can benefit
> from their approach due to the open source methods they employ:
> participation
> based; distributed; integrated with the development cycle. i don't see
> this
> approach anywhere else, and to be completely frank it shows in our (and
> yes,
> i mean all of us here) software.

i think what a lot of developers dont realise is if we start early in a
project and do it The Right Way (tm), a lot of these problems we find
after deployment will sortof disappear.  and in the long run that makes
the product cheaper because we dont have to spend so much time in the end
reengineering something that could have been fixed at the beginning

> personally, i'd love to see OU.o get some resources thrown at them to
> expand
> what they are doing. so far it's been a labour of love for a small band of
> usability experts (go open source! =), and they've shown what is possible
> with even those minimal resources. i faint to think of what they could do
> with the proper resources.

ah, i still hope for individual projects to dedicate one developer to fix
usability and accessibility bugs *dreams*

> <unhijack!>

Cheers!

---
Celeste Lyn Paul
www.obso1337.org
seele at obso1337.org




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