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This blog moved to my private website (feed)!

Today Olaf published the second checklist in the scope of the HIG Hunting Session - it is about Text and Fonts. Just like last week, we ask users of the KDE 4 Alpha release to review applications along checklists and report infringements in the bug tracking system. More details in the weekly dot article! Read More

Yesterday, the usability review cycle for KDE4 started. As the HCI working group is poor on man-power, we started an experiment to include the community into the search for obvious infringements of the KDE Human Interface Guidelines: The HIG Hunting Season. Read More

As the result of a long discussion on kde-core-devel, I summarised the suggested application and system shortcuts for KDE4: Standard Keyboard Shortcuts About Shortcuts and Accelerators [The table isn't formatted yet - are there volunteers to make it look like these ones? I really hate tables in MediaWiki...] Read More

Finally, the dialog section in the HIG has made some progress. Thank to Olaf who knows Qt Designer much better than I do, we found a way to create a clean dialog layout for KDE4. The trick is to use the same ratio of spacers on bottom of each group box. Read more in the guidelines! Read More

A few weeks ago, Celeste posted specs for standard toolbars for the major KDE applications. Now, we wrote down some general guidelines. Again, please review and give feedback in the comments section, or write to me (ellen kde org). There are still screenshots missing for the standard toolbars. Read More

@ 800x600 rule So far, I'm not sure if we should go for a fixed maximum size or a maximum default size. There is one good reason for a strict maximum size: It better prevents configuration dialogs from being overloaded. "Designing for 800x600" may be understood as "hey, it fits onto the page!". A tricky developer might reduce the height of scalable widgets like the table in the screenshot below, and argue that users can resize the dialog if they want to have a better overview over the element in the table. Read More

I started to write down some guidelines for configuration dialogs in KDE4. The major differences to KDE3 are: Do not overload your configuration dialogs! Avoid the usage of tree views in the sidebar of paged dialogs. Set the dialog's maximum size to 800x600 Pixels. Make sure all dialog pages are sized equally, so the dialog does not resize. Provide vertical and horizontal scrollbars on each tab (hide them by default). This allows users who require big font sizes to reach all contents while they can see the tab titles and reach the OK/Cancel buttons. Separate advanced preferences from frequently used ones. Please review the guidelines and give me feedback. I'm basically interested in everything - if you agree on the contents, the format, if there are parts missing, if you need more examples, more concrete guidelines etc. Also, in the lower part of the page, there are some suggestions for new widgets in the standard sections I'd like to see feedback for (font and color requester). You can either use this blog's comment section or write an email to ellen kde org). Read More

In November, OpenUsability announced six mentored projects for students of usability, user interface design, interaction design, or related. We received applications from all over the world - New Zealand, India, South Africa, Europe, South America, USA and Canada. Most of the applicants were highly skilled, and it was sometimes difficult to take a decision. Finally, the following teams formed up: Read More

One year ago, some people from linaccess, barrierefrei kommunizieren, KDE Accessibility and Usability (including myself) passed a weekend on testing the usability of FLOSS accessibility solutions - you might remember our reports from the Accessibility meets Usability weekend. Among others, the Gnopernicus screen reader was usability tested by two blind users. Short after the test, the development of Gnopernicus was (at least partly) stopped for the benefit of Orca which relies on AT-SPI technology. Read More

Let's give it another try! After both Berlin-based usability get-togethers ("Open Source Usability Stammtisch" and "Usability Professionals Stammtisch") somehow died during last summer, we decided to join the two efforts. Starting tomorrow, we'll have regular meetings (2nd Wednesday/month) at newthinking store in Berlin Mitte. For each get-together, a topic is prepared by one of the participants and worked out during the session. Read More

To all students of usability, ui design, interaction design or related: Three weeks ago we announced the Season of Usability, a series of sponsored student projects. We want to inform you that the application period ends in one week, on December 15th. So if you are interested to participate, send us your application now - including a short cv/resume and a few paragraphs about your prior experience with regard to usability. Read More

For the next generation of KDE's file manager, we want a better handling of removable drives such as USB sticks, USB and firewire drives, CDs and DVDs, ZIP (does anybody still use this??) and flash memory. We set up a short survey to answer the questions that bother us most: How many removable drives are usually connected to a computer and what are they used for? Read More

After a few weeks of hunting for mentors and projects we proudly declare the Season of Usability opened: Season of Usability 2006/2007 - Call for Student Application Season of Usability 2006/2007 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) projects. Read More

It's this time of the year again: Tomorrow, it's World Usability Day, that means many events about usability all around the world. In Berlin, there is an event at Meistersaal close to Potsdamer Platz. Read More

Our first OpenUsability sponsored student project is making good progress: Last weekend I participated in a meeting to collect use scenarios for the GIMP, which was part of the student project offered by Peter Sikking. Read More

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In the scope of OpenUsability's GIMP student project we are planning a usability activity in Berlin between October 31st and November 2nd. The goal is to gain a better understanding of the every day work of professional graphic artists, web and icon designers. We'd like to visit you at home or in your accustomed work environment, ask some questions and watch you do your usual tasks. All in all, this is not going to take longer than 2 hours. Read More

Few OSS projects have a distinct usability community - and even in large projects like KDE and Gnome there is only a fistful of trained usability contributors. Why so? For an article which will be published in the German Open Source Yearbook 2007, I spent the last weeks comparing and analysing usability efforts in different OSS projects. Here are my top-four factors influencing usability in OSS: Read More

[image:2415 width=600 class=showonplanet align=center] the scenery around dublin is really beautiful. however, after 10 nights in a dark hostel room, I'm really really looking forward to go home, to sleep in my own bed, have a shower in my own bathroom, and eat in restaurants where "vegetarian" is not a foreign word ;-) Read More

Yesterday we had our Human-Computer Interaction Day with a very rich programme. There was an accessibility and a usability track, as well as a session on icon naming by the artists. Read More

2006 isn't over yet, but the KDE Usability Project has already invested a huge amount of time in usability research. I've now put some of this work online, including reports about information design of the Human Interface Guidelines, about Amarok, Kaffeine, Kivio and What's This Help: Read More

For the redesign of Kivio, Tina and me set up a user survey to learn more what people do with diagramming applications, what types of diagrams they create and what features they really need. The results of the survey are important in several ways: Read More

Summarising the comments on the previous blog entry and my own consideration: Top-to-Bottom – Users do not want to think about the proper sequence of options. The layout should therefore support the workflow. Top-to-bottom is mostly perceived to fulfill this requirement. Read More

... for the Germans around, especially Berlin-based ones: Call for Papers and Participation - WUD Berlin 2006 2nd World Usability Day (WUD) 2006 in Berlin ZIELSTELLUNG Read More

A few weeks ago, I complained about the possibilities to align and group elements when designing KDE dialogs with Designer. But in order to make Designer better meet our requirements, we first have to define what KDE dialogs should look like: We need to define guidelines. Read More

After three years at relevantive, I decided to work as a freelancer again - and moved in to a shared office in Berlin Kreuzberg. While the relevantive office was beautiful, this is sure a small upgrade: Read More

OpenUsability is proud to announce the offering of a series of sponsored student projects. They provide an excellent way for usability, user-interface design, and interaction design students to gain experience in the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects. Read More

Tom Chance and his girlfriend Ali are in Berlin for a short holliday. Together with Scott and the relevantive crew we had a barbecue and enjoyed the sunset on the roof top. Hach, summer nights in Berlin are just great! Read More

... or do more people have problems to lay out dialogs properly with Designer? I struggled for about half an hour with the automatic alignment functions, and all I got was this cluttered dialog layout: Read More

Ken posted the group foto from the Ubuntu dev summit in Paris today: [image:2146 width=600 class=showonplanet align=center] http://bootsplash.org/14_3.jpg Even if I really needed the recovery weekend afterwards in Paris, I much enjoyed the summit. Guess this was the first time I attended a FOSS developer meeting that had such a tough schedule: Based on spec topics that were formulated prior to the meeting, the "BoFinator" planned our days to attend meetings from 9 am to 6 pm in which we discussed and drafted the scope of each spec. Read More

Recently, I remembered this button: [image:2103 width=200 class=showonplanet align=center] Peter from the KOffice team seems to know what it is about. When he started to rewrite Kivio, the KDE flowcharting application, he immediately informed the usability group and asked for input regarding the user interface. Even before the first line of code was written - and ergo nothing could be tested. This was a good decision out of two reasons: Read More

** Sebastian, one of the blind participants of the Accessibility-Meets-Usability weekend, just told me that the development of Gnopernicus, a screen reader and magnifier for Gnome, has been stopped. I hope these are just rumours? It would be a pity. Instead, the development of Orca will be reinforced which is actually good news (thanks henrik for the clarification!). Read More

I much enjoyed the Berlin Dapper Release Party yesterday at DanielHolbach's place in Berlin Neukoelln. He even served my favourite drink: Schonk - Club Mate with Rum =) Read More

As announced I summarised the results of our Accessibility meets Usability weekend in a (long but interesting) report available on OpenUsability (PDF). We did usability tests with several KDE features for partially sighted people and the Gnopernicus screen reader for Gnome. The goal of the usability tests was not to achieve statistical data, but to gain an understanding of the needs of the represented user types. Read More

when I left the office today, I wrote todo's on two post-its - one to stay there, one to process during the weekend back home. hmm - I just put my notebook out of the bag and what happened? The office post-it was sticking on my notebook, while I left the one for the weekend at the desk.... the annoying part about it is that I can remember exactly two out of the three items that were written on it. eletronic todos are so much more useful!!! Read More

I sometimes wonder if my list of todos could grow any longer... Is it because I can't say no, because I'm interested in too many things, or because daily work too often keeps me away from my "fun" projects? Probably a mix of all =) Read More

Like Cristian, I'm still in information processing mode from the Printing Summit - as expected it was a lot of input, and even more to think about. Printing needs to become more task-oriented instead of being device-centered, an idea that much overlaps with KDE HCI's current efforts to picture the future of KDE. Read More

During my three years of usability presence in Open Source projects, printing has twice been the stumbling block to extensive and hot-blooded discussions about the whole purpose of usability for Linux. Read More

A common solution I hear in OSS projects to learn about relevant features is to track the users' interactions with the software: The menu items they click, the settings they check, the applications they use. Implementing a tool that is able to track such data seems to be a widespread idea among Open Source developers. The rationale is usually to provide usability experts (like me) with data that describes the actions and behaviours of users. Read More

I finally managed to summarise the Test results from the usability tests with the German Wikipedia (at least most of them - three sections are still missing): You can either download the PDF, or you can edit and comment the results yourself directly on Wikipedia !Upadet link! (after several steps the final URL now) Read More

Tonight, Olaf and Gunnar from the KDE Accessibility team will come over to Berlin. Together with the linaccess crew, we will perform usability tests with KDE's, and possibly Gnome's accessibility features during the next two days. Tina will support me on the usability side. Read More

Let's have a look at font settings: In Konqueror, pressing Defaults resets the fonts to the current Control Center Default font. In Konversation, pressing Defaults resets the fonts to the Control Center Default at Konversation's startup. This is not necessarily the current one. Imagine you change the Control Center Default, but Konversation and some other apps have not adopted the settings. You go to each of them and change the font settings manually as the Defaults button has no effect. A lot of work - and all for nothing: Restarting the X Server would have done the same job. In KMail, you either use custom colours or you do not (the latter will set the current Control Center Defaults). The Defaults button, however, has no effect. So there is no way to base a new colour scheme on the Default, once you've changed it. Resume: Three applications, two different types to visualise the font settings, and three different behaviours to reset to the defaults. Read More

... because you pressed this button? [image:1800 align=center width=320 class=showonplanet] The Defaults button in KDE's Configure... dialogs resets all application settings to the factory defaults. In a tabbed dialog design, this does not become clear at all: The label does not tell if it refers to the current tab or to the whole dialog. For the user, this is especially difficult to learn as KControl behaves differently: Here, the Defaults button refers to the currently active tab only. Read More

[.. as this test is for German-speaking participants only, I'll proceed in German] Teilnehmer für Wikipedia-Usabilitytest in Berlin gesucht! Um die Einstiegsschwelle zur Mitarbeit an der freien Enzyklopädie Wikipedia zu reduzieren, führen wir im Rahmen von OpenUsability nächste Woche (6. bis 10. Februar) Usabilitytests mit der deutschen Version der Wikipedia durch. Dazu suchen wir TeilnehmerInnen! Read More

Exactly three years ago I was busy writing my diploma thesis - it was about a help system which showed the user directly in the application where and how to perform certain tasks. This type of help is called contextual or context sensitive help. Read More

In my previous entry, I mentioned that there are still too few usability people involved with OSS usability - both in the scope of OpenUsability as well as in other efforts like the FLOSS Usability group. Read More

2005 is over - and it was a very eventful year for OpenUsability.org: We had our first booth at the German LinuxTag, visited numerous developer conferences and Linux days to talk about usability and to provide live usability support. Also, we haven't frightened the KDE developers too much so they once more invited us to aKademy ;-) In September, we started our first regular regional OpenUsability Get-Together in Berlin, and are close to getting an e.V. Read More

This year, the chaos communication congress was productive for me: I finally manged to summarise the results of the user interviews and Konqueror usability test we did in August. Download: Report in PDF [2,5 MB] Read More

22c3 has started, finally °°° Antenne and me are busy preparing our Paper Prototyping Workshop on Friday. [image:1706 align=center class=showonplanet]

As Harald and Adriaan already mentioned I spent this weekend with some 'testing guys' in Hamburg to evaluate the possibilities of automated usability/accessibility testing. Also from my side the meeting was a big success, and not only because of the food and the gluehwein, or because I finally saw the countdown+text pedestrian lights in real life ;-) Read More

... at the Berlin Open Software Usability Meeting, tomorrow evening, Wed, Dec. 7th, 20.00 h, at the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin, Marienstr. 11. Back from my wonderful vacation we decided to have a less serious usability session tomorrow, and inspect several everyday things such as cashpoints, metro maps, usb sticks or coffee machines. Along with it, we'll have some Plaetzchen, and possibly Gluehwein yam Read More

Two weeks ago, I met Lars Stetten from linaccess. Linaccess is a project supporting free software for disabled people. Lars is partially sighted computer science student from Giessen. Some of you may know him from aKademy 2004 (there is an interesting interview with him on the dot). Read More

As I mentioned before, there is finally a world-wide attempt to promote awareness of the benefits of usability engineering and user-centered design: Only three more days till World Usability Day! Around the world, there will be more than 70 events in 35 countries. WorldUsabilityDay is an initiative of the Usability Professionals' Organization. On the official website of WorldUsabilityDay, you can browse the events and will surely find one close to your location. Read More

... is so useful for UI design. Other than a GUI builder it allows for quickly changing input widgets and even whole dialog sequences without programming efforts. It is fast, efficient, and you can put many elements next to each other - till your table or whatever pad you use is full. Still you can easily overlook everything without a zoom that decreases the font sizes. Read More

[image:1534 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet] Our site for the Berlin event in the scope of the World Usability Day on November 3rd is up: www.usabilitytag.de Layout and Design by tina and holehan. Read More

At aKademy, Frank performed a live usability test with Thomas Nagy's kdissert, a powerful mindmapping tool for building texts. I extended the usability test a bit and used kdissert myself to summarise the results. This is an extract of the mindmap: Read More

... they did it! Yesterday, the first "Restzeitampel" (remaining time traffic lights) was put into operation in Hamburg, Germany. Typically German, they outmatched the approach I described a few weeks ago by adding the hint "Green in [seconds]" . Strange enough, they write Green in red! Read More

I never liked the idea that girls are technically less interested than boys or get less into technology. But this user survey we are conducting really keeps frustrating me!!! Background: Two weeks ago, we started interviewing people on how they organise their documents and files on their hard disk. We asked random people who showed up for a web usability test, that means our participants covered all types of internet users between 18 and 50 years. Read More

I've quite often thought of getting my own webspace. But what next? cms, blog or wiki? which software to use? what fits my purpose? Bjoern yesterday pointed this site to me: Read More

Today, we'll have another Open Software Usability meeting in Berlin, 20.00, at relevantive. Today's topics: World Usability Day On November 3rd, it's the World Usability Day. We are planning an event in Berlin which will mainly address Open Source Usability. We have to discuss organisational things, such as finding a room, who volunteers, what talks and workshops to offer. CMS Usability Guidelines Once more, we will address Content Management Systems in order to specify User Interface Guidelines for CMS in the long run. After inspecting Typo3 a few weeks ago, we'll have a look at Mambo today and we'll set up relevant chapters of the future guidelines. On OpenUsability, there is a project for this purpose as well as a wiki. CMS for HTML Protoypes Furthermore, we want to clarify if CMS can be used to quickly produce HTML prototypes and click dummies which can be used for usability testing. Hope to see some of the Berlin guys there :) Read More

... where are last year's autumn skies? [image:1451 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet]

Need a funny start for this week? Try Microsoft tries to recruit me by Eric S. Raymond.

[image:1424 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet] Some of you may have spotted the funny pedestrian lights in Malaga: When jumping to 'Go!', the small green man starts to walk and a countdown tells the pedestrian how much time is left to cross the road. When counting 8 seconds, the man starts to hurry: He runs to get to the other side of the street :) Read More

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. Read More

Now that the whole usability crowd has arrived (Tina, Florian, Celeste, Thomas, Aaron, Jan and me) we proudly present the final schedule of our usability track :) Thursday, September 1st: Read More

.. this is quite close to my dream of a wlan island as my permanent residence ;-) [image:1374 align=center width=300 class=showonplanet] You might guess it: I'm in Malaga, and hey - 16 women have registered for aKademy this year! Read More

A few weeks ago, we did a session on [w:paper prototyping|paper prototyping]* at the Berlin Open Software Usability meeting. Sven was currently implementing a new PDF import dialog for the GIMP, so we chose it for our exercise. In his blog, he describes the procedure and confronts the results of our prototyping with the current dialog. Antenna was our testperson and took some nice pics. Read More

I installed OpenSUSE this weekend and - I guess you've heard it before - it boots in about 10 seconds!! It's amazing when this happens to your own computer :-) Read More

As posted before, we have regular Open Software Usability meetings in Berlin. This week, we'll talk about a future frontend for browsing with Tenor, KDE's contextual linking engine. Scott will be there to provide us with information on Tenor's background and the data structure. Read More

Last week, I came across a user survey on blog clients. The aim of the study is to identify and understand the users' goals and tasks, tools and features they currently use for blogging as well as problems and changes they would like to see in their clients. The special thing about it: The developers ask all these questions before actually starting to program, namely in the planning phase. The project I am talking about has just registered on OpenUsability, the desktop and handheld blogging software "Expressions" (OSS, of course). Read More

It's no overstatement to say that last week was one of the worst in my entire life. First, Saturday night, both of my bikes were stolen in front of my house (sometimes, Berlin sucks!). On Tuesday, after a business meeting in Munich, our airplane was cancelled. The substitute airplane had less rows than the original one making us feel like anchovies in a can. Even worse, on Wednesday, my hard disk crashed leaving a number of bad sectors where my home directory used to be. Hah - what a luck I did a BACKUP two weeks ago! Read More

After a relaxing and internet-free weekend at a lake (it's finally summer up here in Berlin!!), I've finished another chapter of the HIG: Document Interfaces (MDI/SDI/TDI). Screenshots and examples are still missing, but any comments and ideas regarding the contents are highly welcome. Note that you can click the 'Click to show rationale' links to see details. Read More

On Wednesday, we will have our first Open Software Usability Get-Together at the Chaos Computer Club in Berlin. Rationale: There are many OS project members in Berlin, wishing for usability advice. And there is a strong usability scene who might want to contribute to OS projects. So why not starting a monthly get-together to introduce them to each other and encourage a long-term collaboration :-) Read More

With our project OpenUsability, we (1) will provide a booth at the LinuxTag in Karlsruhe/Germany, June 22. to 25. As usability people, it is our mission to make things more usable and to put a smile on each (inter)face. Therefore, we are also planning to make the LinuxTag a 'better place': On our booth, we will have sofas, free coffee, tea, and other drinks, possibly some relaxing music.... :) Read More

Today, Fab confirmed my accommodation for the KDEPIM meeting in Achtmaal, Netherlands. There are at least three reasons why I'm really happy to go there: "Speaking Usability" During the last two or three weeks, I've spent a lot if time thinking about how to facilitate the usage of Kontact for less experienced users. Cornelius, Danimo and me discussed some ways, and I finally managed to create a few screenshots and wrote explanatory lines. The problem with such usability proposals is that they are mostly too long - so every developer pitches on the sections that are of concern for him. But without reading the whole document, the context does not become clear and some suggestions simply seem to be stupid =| And even if everybody agrees with the suggestions, they often do not fit in the current project plan and after a few months they are obsolete or forgotten. Meeting each other and "speaking usability" face to face is the best way to avoid this =) Visiting the Netherlands Well, I haven't been there for at least five years!! After the KDE meeting, I'll straightly head to the sea, lie down in the dunes, and enjoy being there *happyness* Seeing some of you guys Lastly, I'll see some of you guys. Always a good reason to travel a few hundred kilometres =)