Summary

The goal of the project was to design a new, cool and usable media interface for the next software revision of GeeXboX, standalone media player that turns your PC into a Home Theater PC. One of the challenges of designing an interface for this kind of system is the low resolution and limited input devices.

During the four months of the project, Francesco, the student intern, performed various analyses and finally produced sketches and storyboards for the interface of GeexBox which he could use to earn credits in one of his user interface design courses.

Celeste Lyn Paul, Usability Mentor:

“I would consider this project a success. I think Francesco [student intern] learned a lot
about user centered design and several of the methods used in interface
design. I think Ben [technical mentor] learned a lot of how to incorporate usability in to the
development process and what it takes to work together with a designer. I
learned a lot about teaching a student who knows very little about usability
and how to get the important stuff across first.
Overall, GeexBox has
benefited from a set of new interface designs which are more usable than what
they previously had.”

About

Project: GeeXboX.

GeeXboX is a free embedded Linux distribution which aims at turning your computer into a so called HTPC (Home Theater PC) or Media Center. Being a standalone LiveCD-based distribution, it’s a ready to boot operating system that works on any Pentium-class x856 computer or PowerPC Macintosh, implying no software requirements. You can even use it on a diskless computer, the whole system being loaded in RAM.

Despite its tiny ISO image size, the distribution comes with complete and automatic hardware detection, not requiring any driver to be added. It supports playback of nearly any kind pf audio/video and image files and all known codecs and containers are shipped in, allowing playing them through various physical supports, either being CD, DVD, HDD, LAN or Internet.

Student Intern: Francesco De Rose, Italy.
Francesco de Rose is a student in his final year of a Master’s Degree in Information
Engineering who has taken courses of interactive software engineering which deals with usability analysis and design of systems.

Francesco could use the Seaon of Usability project to earn credits in one of his usability courses.

Usability Mentor: Celeste Lyn Paul, USA.
Celeste Lyn Paul is an interaction architect in Washington, D.C. and an active contributor to the KDE Usability Project and OpenUsability.

Technical Mentor: Benjamin Zores, France.
Ben Zores is one of the core maintainers of GeeXboX.

Project Work

Roughly, the project tasks included:

• User research which includes conducting an online survey, interviews with acutal users, and creating user personas.
• Conduct an expert interface review of the current system, and based on user research and your findings, propose redesign suggestions.
• Work closely with the developers and iterate design changes, conducting mini-expert reviews after each interface revision until a new, cool, and usable media interface has been developed.

From the project report (by Francesco de Rose, student intern):

1. As first thing, we interviewed the developers. This allowed us to “reverse engineer” the requirements for the GeeXboX. We also gathered information about the requirements for future versions, in order to be able to redeisgn with evolution in mind.

2. The interviews also allowed us to build a model of the intended users. This models were the basis to build so-called personas: that is description of concrete (yet fictitious) instances of our users, with a name, age, interests and cultural bias.

3. A hierarchical task analysis was done. This means taking some of the reasons a person would use GeeXboX and analyse the way to interact with the system to break down their tasks in subtasks and actions, in hierarchical way. Such analysis allowed us to detect some usability problems that could be easily patched, without need to wait for a deep user-interface redesign: for each of these a bug report was filed.

4. A user survey was designed and deployed. We gathered information about the characteristics of our users, their profile, the environment in which they use GeeXboX, which new features they wish. This survey turned out to be a very pleasant surprise because it was answered by many more users than we would have ever expected.

5. Using all the information gathered, we defined a list of priorities for usability, as to have a clear idea on where to concentrate our efforts. For example, we found out that there are some useful functions of GeeXboX that users do not know that exist, like colour and brightness adjustment: improve the usability of these is one of the priorities. The priority list is on project’s wiki, so that everybody can discuss it an make proposals.

6. We started getting deep in the redesign. Some storyboards were prepared, showing how users interact right now with the system to accomplish a task, and showing some alternative designs for the interaction. the team meets, discusses them, and decides which one they think is better.

Downloads and Links

Downloads

• Handout (English, PDF, 3,0 MB)
• Survey Report (English, PDF, 292 KB)
• Full Project Report (Italian, PDF, 2,7 MB)
• Selected Mockups and Storyboards (ZIP, 709 KB)

Links

• Official GeeXBoX project site