What: Usability in Open Source Projekten

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

When: Wednesday, May 7. 18.00.

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

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.

In an easy-flowing disucssion, we talked about the differences between Peter’s and my field of work - interaction architecture and usablity - and how we complement each other. We brought up various examples from OpenUsability as Peter and I have been working together on various FLOSS projects such as Gimp or OpenPrinting. The podcast is in German and available on the Chaosradio Express website.

To celebrate this event, there are several parties all around the world on January 18. In Berlin, we celebrate at the KDAB office in Kreuzberg. All friends of KDE who live in this area are welcome to join!

There will be free beer, coffee, mate and music. We will try to establish a live connection to the main release event in Mountain View, California - and of course you can test KDE 4.0.

Date: January 18, 2008 (Friday)
Start: 20.00 h
Place: KDAB Berlin, Adalbertstr. 7/8, U Kottbusser Tor (see Google maps)

Please register to facilitate our planning:
Send a mail to kde4-release-party@kdab.net

Reminder: Open Printing Project Opening

The application period for the Open Printing student project ends on January 10th.

Usability students who are interested in a challenging design project: Go ahead and send us your application!

The goal is to create a detailed design and UI spec for 7 types of printers; project work will start in the beginning of February.

Read the full project opening and application details on the Season of Usability website: “Project Opening: Printing Experience on Linux”

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To apply for a mentorship, please see the full job description on the Season of Usability website.

From the Job Description

Each student is supervised by two mentors - a usability and a technical mentor. While the technical mentor represents the FLOSS project and makes sure that the direction of the usability input meets the project goals, the usability mentor coaches the student usability-wise.

Apart from methodological and creative advice, this includes a mediating role: On the one side, the student needs to be supported to better understand the project goals. On the other side, the technical mentor needs to gain an understanding of the usability process.

Your Requirements

Usability practitioners. You should have a minimum of one or two years of work experience.

University employees. You should have an advanced university degree (preferably PhD).

Your benefits

Showcases. As it is FLOSS, the products of your mentoring work are open source as well. You are free to use them as public show cases.

Publication. Your work will be presented as a success story at the Season of Usability website.

Publicity. Your company will be presented as a Season of Usability mentoring organisation.

Your Application

Send your application to mentors at openusability.org

In Berlin, there will be an all-day event at Heinrich-Hertz-Institut. We set up a rich programme with a talk and two workshop tracks.

More details on www.usabilitytag.de

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First Season of Usability finished successfully!

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 Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS). During a 3 to 6 month collaboration, students work closely together with key developers from FLOSS projects to improve the user experience of the application. The results of the first Season of Usability are now published on the official website:

http://season.openusability.org

Usability and Open Source (FLOSS) projects can highly benefit from each other. In the informal setting of a FLOSS project usability specialists can develop their skills and create show cases for their customers, while the software gains an optimised user experience. Still there are little intersections between the two disciplines - few examples include OpenUsability, the FLOSS Usability Sprints and usability groups of bigger FLOSS projects such as KDE or Gnome. The entry threshold for usability specialists is high - in FLOSS projects, responsibilities for user interface design often are not clearly defined, it is hard to get started.

Season of Usability is an attempt to lower the entry threshold for both sides and get usability folks into FLOSS development. Students - who benefit most from practical experience - start their work with a viable task scope which is developed in agreement with the lead developers. Students are mentored by an experienced usability specialist, and the whole team meets regularly. Some universities accept the student project to gain credits, and it is even possible to write a diploma thesis in this scope. After successful accomplishment of the task, the students receive a small gratuity.

The first Season of Usability took place from November 2006 to June 2007. Five applications from different fields of application were analysed along usability issues, and parts of the user interface were redesigned. The results were welcomed by the FLOSS developers, and several students continued their work after the official project period had ended.

The results of the projects, including screenshots and work material, are now published on the Season of Usability website.

The next Season of Usability is planned for Spring/Summer 2008. To participate - either as a student, FLOSS project, usability mentor or sponsor - get in touch with us

Background

Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code, OpenUsability joined up with FLOSS Usability, Aspiration and the Open Society Institute to offer a number of sponsored student projects. Other than the Google projects that address developers, they aim at students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design. Students experience the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects while getting into FLOSS development.