Over the summer I will be working with Canonical, the sponsor of the linux operating system Ubuntu. My project focus will be on the information architecture usability of Ubuntu 9.04.
Untill now I had not used Ubuntu. I had always been happy to put up with Vista. Once you have tweeked Vista enough, I find it pretty usable, even though I have heard countless usability gurus ranting on about how much they hate it. Ok so there are a few problems, but it does the job, and like I said if you know what your doing you can tweek it.
The operating system Ubuntu is built (in part) on usability, and on first impressions it appears pretty intuitive. Its a little ugly and cramped I find, but I like the way they remove the start task bar with applications, system and place drop down menus.
I find you need to live with most software (operating systems in particular) for a few weeks before you really get a grasp of its usability. So I aim to do exactly that for the duration of the project. But to be honest it’s not just my usability that’s important here. so its going to be real everyday users that need to be researched.
The aim of the project is going to be to come up with some grounded re-design proposals for the next version of Ubuntu. I will be taking an iterative approach to evaluation, starting by delving into the open source community via forums, blogs, IRC to gain some feedback from stakeholders and real users. This will lead onto some contextual inquiries, in which I will meet some real Ubuntu users (which Canonical have kindly agreed to provide payment incentive for) and conduct some open ended interview with the participants. This session will be mainly about getting to know the users and their context of use (e.g. what applications they use Ubuntu for). It will also involve the participants demonstrating their use with the system.
Fingers crossed this should uncover some usability issues and point towards where the research should go next. At this stage I don’t know what will happen, but it could lead to some card sorting tasks, icon recognition tasks or refined goal orientated usability tasks in the follow up session. And this should then lead to some re-design proposals.
One thing that’s really only just grabbed my attention, is the sheer volume of work involved in a project like this. Its huge! I thought 3 or 4 months would be far more time than I needed, but it probably not half enough time to do a complete job of the entire OS. At best what I research will provide a snap shot of Ubuntu usability. Software like operating systems need a lifetime of research and a whole lot of resources to get things just right (especially when releases happen every 6 months as is with Ubuntu). Nonethless I am looking forward to the opportunity to develop my UCD skills and contribute towards a real software project.
Just to finish, if any Ubuntu users (or people in the open source community) read this and have any interesting comments on their experiences, please let me know. The more real data there is the better the result will be, and as I’m starting to find out about, the open source community is all about... well... community participation.
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