The Season of Usability 2008 makes good progress - as students and mentors have stated by the end of July, most of the projects have reached 50% or more of their initial project goals. Read on for a short wrap up of what have been achieved so far.

Redesigning DrProject’s Administration Interface

Liz Blankenship, a student of Science in Information:

I have been working with developers to improve the usability of DrProject, primarily focusing on a redesign of the web-based administrative interface. I have also offered my input about the interface design of new components that are being created this summer and the usability of DrProject overall.

My main contributions to DrProject up to this point include:

• Working with a developer to create a new web interface for creating roles
• Working with a developer to redesign the interface for administrators to create new users
• Creating a clickable prototypes of the major screens to be redesigned
• Exploratory user testing with three users and sharing my results with the developers
• Understand technical requirements via the developers and users’ needs via cognitive walkthroughs, information architecture principles, and user testing

I believe the redesign has been progressing well. I have been documenting my progress in a blog.

Redesigning Gallery’s Image Upload Tools

Jakob Hilden, student of Communication and Media Science:

During the first four weeks I conducted an expert benchmark analysis of several photo upload interfaces from systems like Gallery, Flickr, Facebook, Zenphoto, Picasa Web Albums and more (see a documentation of the results). This was a great activity to familiarize myself with the whole area and find out what works and what doesn’t with online photo upload interfaces.

Based on this analysis and the feedback I got I designed a mockup interface for Gallery which should make the upload process easier, especially for new users.

After a process of fleshing out certain details of the mockup and gathering feedback I created a more interactive prototype for the interface. With the help of this prototype I just finished the first couple of rounds of user testing.

I’m convinced that the new upload interface will be a good step forward for Gallery’s usability. Besides the design activities I have also started a little more general user research to find out who the Gallery users are.

Improving Jeliot user Interface and Workflows

Sharad Baliyan, student of Interaction Design:

As Jeliot 3 is an Open Source Java Program Visualization application, I first had to understand the pedagogical concerns and theories of learning used in program visualization software. I conducted contextual inquiries with students and lecturers of information/computer science. Also, I finished a cognitive walk through of Jeliot 3.

Based on this learning/analysis, I am currently working on an application framework that supports user tasks. Also, I am working on smoothening the user experience for people who’ve never used program visualizations before and have just installed Jeliot.

Human Interface Guidelines and Design Patterns for KDE4

Becca Scollan, student of Science in Information, and Thomas Pfeiffer, student of Psychology:

Human interface guidelines (HIG) offer application developers a set of recommendations. Their aim is to improve the experience for the users by making application interfaces more intuitive, learnable, and consistent. For KDE4, there is a basic draft of Human Interface Guidelines available. It needs to be completed and supplemented with practical examples.

As part of the project, we’ve researched current design patterns and HIG literature, written several design patterns for KDE and begun organizing and writing the new HIG for KDE4.

Toolbox and Palette Interaction for KOffice

Neha Pahwa, student of Information Technology:

I am working on four applications of KOffice 2.0: KWord, Krita, Karbon and KPresenter. It has been a learning experience for me to understand these applications and apply usability techniques on it.

I have prepared user research profiles for all the four applications. The user research profiles will help the developers to understand their target audience; who should use the application and who should not. The user research profiles also include use case scenarios against which the applications are being evaluated. I have evaluated KWord and I am planning to work on KPresenter in next few days.

3d Widgets for MakeHuman

Eugenio Passacantilli, student of Science in Communications:

For the next software revision MakeHuman wants to use a new GUI, based on a very innovative concept: 3D widgets.

During these weeks, many goals have been reached, in spite of the difficulty of such project; we already achieved, and developed, many parts of the new GUI, such as:

• The overall structure of the new GUI: this new inteface has been studied to consent a natural and correct change into a new 3d structure and to remove obstructive, pre-existing parts in the software
• Steps reduction in the mesh modellation process (general and detail modellation sections will be join togheter).
• New tools conception and design: 3d structure, in fact, needs 3d tools with new, advanced features, such as “rotation” or “distorsion”. The most important tool will be the mesh itself, which will be turned into a 3d, click-sensitive tool. In this new GUI the mesh will be the “core” of modellation, but many other new 3d tool will help user’s work (toolbars, finishing tools, ecc.)
• Usability improvement: Thanks to a deep usabilty study, the new GUI has reached a work oversemplification.

Handheld-Mode Interface for the OLPC XO Laptops

Alessandro Vona, student of Science in Communications:

The work started with analyzing the State of the art of Handheld-Mode Interface for the One Laptop Per Child.

To improve the work I considered some similar interaction paradigms discovering some interesting features regarding to the way their GUI it’s been designed around the input method. Finally we identified common and interesting features that can be very precious for the usability project on OLPC device.

The second step it’s been the recognition of the actions that OLPC handheld mode should support. Finally we consider what type of system we ‘d like to build: a generic one that works identically for every activity or a customizable one that requires the activity to build in support for the mode, but which provides much more power.

At the moment we are working on the sketching of some potential solutions. We are trying to define the all possible interaction solutions in order to have a complete vision of what the best way could be.

Improving HDR imaging with Qtpfsgui

Vladimir Smida, student of Computer Graphics:

Qtpfsgui is now a competitive software in the field of HDR image postprocessing, focusing not on commercial application but on valuable collections of not-a-few techniques of hdr and tone mapping.

The main problem I can see now is in its complicated use which involves foreknowledge of photometric calibration, spectral response function, TMOs specified parameters, etc. In this project I’m trying to take this issue out and make Qtpfsgui available for wide photographers community. It means I’ve had to find out the main usability problems of Qtpfsgui software.

It wasn’t easy to bring new features which would simplify the non-trivial process of creating the TM-ed image depending on not a few settings. That’s why I have created an open discussion about the current workflow. Regular qtpfsgui users have been dragged into the proces of gui improvement. There have been presented and discussed our (SoU team) new ideas as well. As a result, a completely new workflow has been invented. It takes into account the problematic situation of overcrowded setting dialogs.

The main idea was to simplify the overall workflow above the TM process and achieve a faster execution to aim a comfortable and predictable user interaction.At the moment, a part of my work is discussed in my blog. You can also find there a detailed description of the new workflow.

Instant Messaging and VoIP with SIP Communicator

Mike Oren, PhD student of Philosophy:

So far, my mentors and I have outlined a road map for evaluating and improving SIP Communicator’s interface with a focus on multiple protocols.

Using this road map as a guide, I have evaluated and presented a report to the SIP Communicator community on the interface of several multi-protocol messengers and how they handle these protocols. This report can be accessed online.

In addition, I explored the features supported by all of SIP Communicator’s supported protocols and determined which features were the most common (and could potentially be placed on the tool bar of the chat window). I created a survey to evaluate user preferences and needs for SIP Communicator and we are currently in the process of rolling that out to the user community.

A Big Thanks to all students and mentors, and keep up with the good work!