Handful of Nothing

But it was written after, and it’s way clearer and more on the topic than what I was able to express in my 10 minutes writing :

http://mpt.net.nz/archive/2008/08/01/free-software-usability

If you read the past post, please take your time to go through the items. This is by far some of the most arguments that I agree most.

Updating: the article was commented also by Celeste Lyn from KDE and I think her opinions are really worthy a reading. For example I agree with her on defending the release early, release ofter. We are running the projects with scrum, so the only difference was to make sure the Design team works ahead of the development team one sprints. Also I have been planning and now doing (2 universities) something that has the same goal as the Season of usability, which by the way is just great. I will see if I can take the approach to the Brazilian universities and really start breeding the interest in User Experience design from the core.

I want to quote her specially in this part of her writing :

The problem is no one trusts anyone who opens their mouth and says “usability”. This is a cultural and social problem more than a process problem. Open source is a meritocracy, and it’s easy to prove you are a competent developer because you have other competent developers available to judge them. You can’t do that with designers (at least very easily) and so the only way to get past the cultural and social problem is to start with small contributions just as a new developer may start.

I will take the time to do my version also of the comments slowly but this is important. It is easier for a Usability guy to help with small bits on a already existing project. Because you can find a lot of small problems and good fixes are indeed quite small. But here comes my side of the analyzis: I am really more interested on bringing User Experience. Interaction Design on it’s core to the table on the earlier stages. Like she said, first define the audience, the user and from that point create the experience that will be the best for him. Usability will be the tool to prove and to improve that experience. (to discuss what is what is another topic).

Thank you Matthews and now Celeste for such incredible compilation / explanation of the challenges in the Usability / UX in the open source / free software software.

via: Salvetti : Thanks dude | sorry for the mess. Coming from vacations my head still out of control :)