moving on ....

aKademy is over now - time for a final summary :) One of my personal highlights was Richard Moore hacking the What's this help. Improving the usability of the What's this help has been a concern to me for quite a long time, I had some ideas in mind but never found somebody to implement them. Thanks Richard! Our final goal is to make it part of a nested contextual help system: The user will be guided right from the descriptions in the interface (labels, tooltips e.g.) to the more descriptive What's this help and finally to the corresponding pages in the manual or in a tutorial.

Another important result of aKademy is the network of collaboration and communication we've set up to better integrate usability with the development process: Establishing a HCI workgroup incorporating accessibility,artwork, i18n and usability, setting up an established review process within the HCI group, getting support by some developers and possibly by Trolltech technical writers for writing the HIG, meeting Pete Goodell to increase the cooperation between OpenUsability and the Novell Migration study people, etc. etc. etc.

Finally, I was really impressed by the work recently done in KDE. We (the whole usability crew) were quite busy having a look at all the interfaces that were being produced, giving advice and exchanging ideas. Celeste has summarised some of our usability activities at aKademy and posted it on the dot

I'm now heading to Bremen to give a class on UI Design at the German informatica feminale. I hope everything will work out fine as my stomach is still a bit upside down :-|