First Season of Usability finished successfully

Season of Usability is a series of sponsored student projects to encourage students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design to get involved with Freee/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS). During a 3 to 6 month collaboration, students work closely together with key developers from FLOSS projects to improve the user experience of the application. The results of the first Season of Usability are now published on the official website:

http://season.openusability.org

Usability and Open Source (FLOSS) projects can highly benefit from each other. In the informal setting of a FLOSS project usability specialists can develop their skills and create show cases for their customers, while the software gains from an optimised user experience. Still there are little intersections between the two disciplines - few examples include OpenUsability, the FLOSS Usability Sprints and usability groups of bigger FLOSS projects such as KDE or Gnome. The entry threshold for usability specialists is high - in FLOSS projects, responsibilities for user interface design often are not clearly defined, it is hard to get started.

Season of Usability is an attempt to lower the entry threshold for both sides and get usability folks into FLOSS development. Students - who benefit most from practical experience - start their work with a viable task scope and are mentored by an experienced usability specialist. The intersections to the project responsibilities are well-defined, and the teams meet regularly. Some students can use the student project to gain credits at their university, and it is even possible to write a diploma thesis in this scope. After successful accomplishment of the task, the students receive a small gratuity.

The first Season of Usability took place from November 2006 to June 2007. Five applications from different fields of application were analysed along usability issues, and parts of the user interface were redesigned. The results were welcomed by the FLOSS developers, and several students continued their work after the official project period had ended.

The results of the projects, including screenshots and work material, are now published on the official Season of Usability website.

The next Season of Usability is planned for Spring/Summer 2008. To participate - either as a student, FLOSS project, usability mentor or sponsor - get in touch with us!

Background

Inspired by Google’s Summer of Code, OpenUsability joined up with FLOSS Usability, Aspiration and the Open Society Institute to offer a number of sponsored student projects. Other than the Google projects that address developers, they aim at students of usability, user-interface design, and interaction design. Students experience the interdisciplinary and collaborative development of user interface solutions in international software projects while getting into FLOSS development.