ayatana-ux team mailing list archive

[Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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This is a summary of today's Ayatana UX meeting.

Attending: Allan Caeg, Allan Day, Benjamin Humphrey, Ivanka Majic, Kevin
Godby, Mat Tomaszewski, Matthew Paul Thomas, Thorsten Wilms, Vish.

== Apologies ==

I'm sorry I was not available to run a meeting last week. I was at a
conference called UX London, which coincidentally covered several topics
relevant to the work we're doing in this team.
<http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/the-art-science-of-seductive-interactions>
<http://www.slideshare.net/bokardo/metricsdriven-design-4317168>
<http://www.umsec.umn.edu/events/Code-Freeze-2010/RWAUED>
<http://whitneyhess.com/blog/creating-a-culture-of-ux/>

== Usability testing and research session at UDS ==

Benjamin and Kenvin summarized what happened at this session.
<https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/design-m-ubuntu-usability>

First, Charline Poirier presented some usability findings from recent
Ubuntu Lucid testing.

Next, Benjamin and Kevin want to set up an interaction data collection tool.
<godbyk> The gist of the idea is that, in addition to collecting
qualitative usability data from testing in the lab, we could also
collect some more quantitative data automatically using a daemon that
runs on people's computers.

So, it's similar to Mozilla's Test Pilot plugin for Firefox
<https://testpilot.mozillalabs.com/> -- as opposed to something like the
proposed Gnome usability testing suite
<http://live.gnome.org/UsabilityProject/Whiteboard/UsabilityTestingSuite>,
or QA testing like Mago <and https://launchpad.net/mago>.

Benjamin and Kevin have work items to prepare a design specification for
this new tool. Then we can publicize it and hopefully inspire people to
implement it.

== UX advocate project ==

Ivanka talked about the idea, discussed at UDS, of encouraging UX
advocates for individual upstream projects.
<https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/design-m-designing-with-upstreams>

The idea has already been discussed in Gnome.
<http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2010-May/msg00006.html>
<aday_> me and andreas nilsson are planning to have a bof on the topic
at guadec
<aday_> that said, there are some serious obstacles to overcome.
nothing's going to happen overnight
...
<ivanka> I have already spoken to launchpad to see if we can have a UX
advocate role on [a] project

Ivanka will interview Thorsten about his experience helping with UX for
Ardour. We'll look for other existing examples (Allan Day mentioned
Bryan Clark for Thunderbird) while waiting for Launchpad to add the UX
advocate field, and then we'll publicize the idea further.

== Follow-up on the Sudoku heuristic evaluation ==

Three people on the ayatana@ list offered heuristic evaluations of
Sudoku. You can find them by following the "Next by thread" links
starting from <https://lists.launchpad.net/ayatana/msg01845.html>.
Now someone needs to collate the evaluations for Robert Ancell.

One issue that came up during the evaluations is that general usability
heuristics only obliquely cover common usability problems for games in
particular. Allan Day will investigate whether anyone wants to compile
some heuristics more suited for games.

Our next meeting will be next Thursday at 1200 UTC in #ubuntu-meeting.

Cheers
- -- 
Matthew Paul Thomas
http://mpt.net.nz/
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