Tomorrow, I will give a presentation (German) about Usability in KDE at Linuxtag in Berlin.

What? It’s not just testing - Usability in KDE

I will focus on the importance of defining the project goals and provide three principles to design good KDE applications.

When? Friday, May 30. 15.00-16.00.

Where? Messe Berlin, Saal Paris (UG)

Four weeks after the Call for Students has been finished, most of the Season of Usability mentors have selected their student intern.

With a total of 130 applications, selecting a student was not an easy process for our mentors - and a clear indication for us that we need to provide more projects in 2009! Usability professionals who are interested to participate as a mentor are welcome to contact me.

Celeste and me are mentoring two KDE projects. For Human Interface Guidelines and Design Patterns for KDE, we got two student interns: Becca Scollan, student of Science in Information, and Thomas Pfeiffer, student of Psychology. They will do their best to complete the KDE Human Interface Guidelines and define interaction paradigms for the most common design patterns used in KDE.

For the Toolbox and Palette Interaction for KOffice project, Neha Pahwa, student of Information Technology, will analyse the interaction paradigm of four core applications of the KOffice suite, KWord, KPresenter,the image manipulation application Krita, and the vector graphics application Karbon. As a first step, Neha will interview the developers to identify the major project goals and target users.

We will document the progress in our blogs. Stay tuned!

On May 7, I will give a presentation about the impact of usability at the Berlin Linux User Group (BeLUG). Along examples from KDE and Gnome, I will illustrate the effects of a project vision and user research.

What: Usability in Open Source Projekten

Where: BeLUG e.V., Lehrter Str. 53, 12557 Berlin

When: Wednesday, May 7. 18.00.

I am proud to announce the Season of Usability 2008, a series of projects for students of usability, user interface design, interaction design and related.

We accept 10 students for design tasks, user research and UI analysis. The openings represent a wide range of applications, such as instant messaging, office suites, web applications and the One Laptop Per Child desktop.

With regard to KDE, Celeste and me will accept two students to continue the work on Human Interface Guidelines and Design Patterns for KDE4. Also, we will accept a student for KOffice.

If you are a student of usability, user interface design or related, send us your application until April, 14. Project work will start in May and will take approximately 3 months. An involvement of 15 hours per week is expected.

Students receive a stipend of $1000 USD, kindly sponsored by Google Inc., the Open Society Institute and Trolltech ASA.

Other project openings include:

• Redesigning DrProject’s Administration Interface
• Redesigning Gallery’s Image Upload Tools
• 3d Widgets for MakeHuman
• Handheld-Mode Interface for the OLPC XO Laptops
• Analysing Pidgin’s status quo and making design suggestions
• Instant Messaging and VoIP with SIP Communicator
• Supporting TV Viewers with TV-Browser

See the project details at the Season of Usability website

Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS). During a 3 to 6 month collaboration, students work together with an experienced usability mentor and key developers of the project to improve the user experience of a FLOSS application. The next Season of Usability with 8 student projects will start in Spring 2008.

FLOSS Projects who would like to benefit from a usability student are encouraged to fill in our Call for Projects questionnaire:

>> Season of Usability 2008 - Call for Projects Questionnaire (available till February 20th)

For further details, please see the Call for Projects page on the Season of Usability website.