I had an opportunity to collaborate on a paper with Marcus. His project, briefly, is about assisting a change in behavioral patterns of youth in Africa. By the means of application development, participatory design, and incremental implementation-evaluation cycles, he aims to affect the ways people talk (or do not talk, currently) about HIV.
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As I mentioned earlier, I am participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability.
Selecting the students was very hard. There were approximately 8 applicants for each of the two projects, and unfortunately we had to reject applications of excellent guys and gals.
I am mentoring in two projects, namely in Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui and in Improving Jeliot user interface and workflows. In the Qtpfsgui project, Vladimir started redesigning the user interface to improve the preview by letting the users modify the settings of operators and see instantly the outcome. In the Jeliot project, Sharad started big by studying the pedagogical principles of program animation and their effects on the design of user interfaces.
From the research point of view, the Season of Usability is an interesting way how to raise awareness of the usability issues in the OSS community. So far, they have been greatly overlooked. Being part of this is a great experience in itself.
..or maybe not entirely, I just wanted to draw your attention to this interesting but rather not surprising post . Somebody asked a Windows non-geek user to use Ubuntu for first time (I understood). Kind of usability test it was.
When it came to the conclusions of that post, it said:
The main issue with the desktop experience is that the geeky programmers and designers assume too much from the average user. They assume the user knows about the way in which programs are installed, or how the file system is set out. The average user will not go out of their way to google for help or even read the associated documentation that comes with Ubuntu and its default software. The little information pop-ups and guided wizards are critical to explaining how the user can accomplish the basic tasks they most probably are trying to do.
And that’s the no news. We knew this before, didn’t we. We had that discussion anyway before . Still, I expect, somebody will be of that opinion “it has a nice GUI so it is easy.” It is still a long way.
I will be participating as a mentor in this year’s Season of Usability. SoU is a series of sponsored (up to $1000) projects where students interested in usability apply to work for three months with some open-source software to improve its usability. There are nine very interesting projects, have a look at the openings, and apply!
Some time ago it was obvious that usability and open source software, and windowing systems –desktop environments– of OSS operating-systems in particular, were two different worlds. Some people talked about it as a lack of usability. Times have changed, and it feels like more and more usable OSS applications are appearing. Also the desktops go that way, or should I say: FINALLY SOMEBODY GOT THE BRAINS. Still, it sometimes feel that even some steps have been taken, nothing really deeper than this is happening.
It then seems to me like an area of need of bit of research. I was wondering, whether the readers of this blog know about good links and papers that would discuss the issues of usability and OSS? For a start, e.g. this paper seems to be interesting.
It is a very well known fact that different colors mean/symbolize different things in different cultures. One of these is the difference how Black and White are perceived in western cultures and how they are perceived in Asia. (For a short overview of what is believed to symbolize what, check this).
How about in Kenya? During our thousands of kilometers around this country I was wondering why there are not many traffic lights. One reason is obvious, they are costly. However, a local driver told me that where there were traffic lights installed, the number of accidents increased. His explanation was that the red color symbolizes danger; therefore many drivers when seeing the red signal push the gas pedal as though there would be some danger.
So I went on finding an evince for the claim. During one of my lectures I presented to the audience three choices about what does the RED mean to them. The three choices were danger, hot, and stop. I used the same choices as in one of the previous works comparing Hong Kong Chinese and Americans. In the lecture settings the 25 participants could provide a multiple response. (I do not attempt to approach this as a formal experiment, but if you are interested for more details contact me).
Fifteen out of 25 (60%) related red with danger, nobody related red with hot, and 1 (4%) connected red with stop. Comparing to the Hong-Kong Chinese (65%, 31%, 49%) the differences are obvious. While almost half of the Chinese can associate red with stop, almost nobody from my sample did the same.
Do you think it can explain why the traffic lights as we know in West do not work?
Whether the driver’s anecdote is true or not, and how does the results of this small survey apply for whole country remains open. There are tens of tribes, sub-cultures and languages in this country, so to generalize the findings is hard. I would not like this post to be perceived as a piece of research, since the settings were very vague, as well as I do not know how many of the participants in my lecture had a driving licence, what is their background, etc..
However, this ‘research’ has started from an observation and then it attempted to find an empirical evidence. In many of the contemporary cultural works it is often done the other way round.
I am getting really frenzy with the way how Windows organize the icons on their (but MINE!) desktop. Everytime I save some file on my desktop I have big problems with finding it. My desktop’s icons are organized so that applications are on the left, and I put the data on the right, both links, shortcuts to datafolders and actual files.
Now, when I save something new on the desktop, Windows will put icon at an arbitrary (probably the next ‘free’ slot) location. I also observed it tends to be the left-top-free-first-organize algorithm. I call this very poor usability.
But I want my data-files icons to appear on my right-hand side, always. How to do it, folks?