Usability

The KDE Usability Project reports I posted last week received a lot of feedback. There were several motivations for posting the reports, and I think it was a success. They are a useful reference for developers and other usability specialists as well as provides a public appearance for what the project does. Some of the feedback included questions about the project and reports.

Usability has grown over the year since the last aKademy. During the Coding Marathon portion of the conference, the KDE-Usability group gave several presentations and tutorials so developers can learn more about usability, and get live usability support while they hacked away. It was a great success and there were a lot of great bug fixes completed during the weekend. The following is a summary of the presentations and tutorials from the conference.

For the German speakers in the KDE community, last night Ellen Reitmayr, of OpenUsability.org, who was involved in the recently covered KDE PIM Usability Review was a guest for the most recent episode of the Chaos Computer Club's Chaos Radio for which the topic was user interfaces. Roughly 110 minutes in KDE developer Daniel Molkentin also called.

During recent conversations with some of the members of the OpenUsability project, some of the usability work on one of the more exciting applications in KDE, KPDF, was brought to my attention. I managed to catch up with Florian, from OpenUsability, and Albert, one of the KPDF maintainers to talk a little about themselves and their work and about the usability review and followup in KPDF.

The folks from Newsforge are covering some of the recent cooperation between the usability folks from OpenUsability and the KDE PIM developers. PIM developers Cornelius Schumacher and Till Adam along with Ellen Reitmayr from OpenUsability talked about some of the usability that stemmed from the KDE PIM usability review which started at aKademy last year.