Janet Haven

I had a long chat with Ellen Reitmeyer of OpenUsabilty.org on Monday. Ellen's a usability designer, based in Berlin, and was involved in founding OpenUsability because of her company's usability design work on the KDE project. (KDE is a graphical desktop interface for Linux and Unix environments.)

What they noticed were that many open source projects could use the attention that they gave to KDE, but that there was little interaction between the two communities. So OpenUsability was set up as a matchmaker service for designers and open source projects to find each other. The problem that Ellen points to now is not the lack of interest of the open source community (more than 100 projects have signed up on OpenUsability, looking for help), but the too few usability designers. Currently, most of the designers listing themselves on the site are based in Germany (although the site is set up in English), as Ellen is. Most of them, she said, she knows personally.

Working on usabliity on open source projects is not easy, as I wrote about a couple of days ago. Ellen echoed several points, including, perhaps most importantly, the social engineering that goes into implementing usability suggestions from designers. "You need to have a personal relationship with a key person in the development group," Ellen said, which of course means more time and effort on the part of scarce designers. She also emphasized the problem of finding developers in open source projects who are interested in revising design components, rather than adding new functionality to a project.

We ended up talking about ways to get more usability expertise involved in open source projects. After batting around the idea of raiding design schools during the summertime, or running competitions to encourage usablity experts to submit projects, Ellen made what sounded to me like a brilliant suggestion: why not run something like Google's Summer of Code, but for usabliity/design students. The Summer of Code 2005 was a project I missed at the time, but which I love in retrospect:

The Summer of Code is a program in which student developers are provided with a stipend to create new open source programs or to help currently established projects. Google will be working with a variety of open source, free software and technology related groups to identify and fund up to 400 projects over a 3 month time span. Since Google couldn't possibly mentor 400 people working on disparate projects, we felt it would be wise to spread the work out.

Essentially, Google wanted to mentor new open source developers, and it put up 5000 USD a head for the summer for students to work on established open source projects. Lovely. They're planning to do it again in 2006.

Back to usability: Ellen posited that an incentivized summer program like Summer of Code (Summer of Usabliity doesn't really have the same snappy ring, unfortunately) in which usability design students could be matched up with open source projects would do both sides a world of good. She suggested that open source projects could define part of projects that particularly need usability help, and attach a student designer to that part of the development team - thus fostering a relationship within the group, and producing specific improvements by the end of the summer.

I like this idea a lot. I wonder if Google wants to expand its Summer programs to other areas?