Between May and September 2008, the second Season of Usability took place -
All in all great success!

Ten students contributed to nine F/OSS projects by doing user research, usability analysis or UI mockups. All projects were finished successfully - in average, the teams fulfilled 80% of their initial project goals. Given the fact that most mentors claimed to have set an overly ambitious roadmap at first, this is a very good value. Also, six of the ten students will continue their work on the project. See our Success Stories for more information.

A very positive surprise was the number of applicants in 2008: More than 130 students from all over the world applied to participate. Unfortunately, this meant that we had to reject a high number of excellent students – a clear indicator for us that we need to offer more projects next year.

As last year, the distributed team setup caused challenges. For students, one of the major problems was to get access to target users in their area for usability testing. We will try to provide access to remote testing tools next year to overcome this problem.

Coordinating team meetings and project plans was a challenge mentioned both by students, usability and technical mentors. Though we have given best practices on how to organise the collaboration (weekly Skype meetings, online workspace, etc.), it seems that next year, we should provide more precise guidelines and links to helper-tools for coordination in geographically distributed projects.

Usability mentors required access to free tools such as an online survey or rapid prototyping tool. We’ve been in touch with possible business partners and will be able to offer both in 2009.

We thank all participants for their work and the constructive feedback that will help to make the Season of Usability progressing!

Also, we want to thank our sponsors Google Inc., Trolltech and the Open Society Institute who made the Season of Usability 2009 possible.

Looking ahead to 2009:

To make the Season of Usability 2009 possible, we are in need of:

• Usability Mentors.
  If you would like to participate as a Season of Usability mentor, please have a look at our mentor requirements. If you feel you are qualified, send an application to mentors at openusability.org and include a few paragraphs about your work experience, why you would like to mentor a student project and if you would like to be involved with a certain FLOSS project.
• Sponsors.
  For their involvement with a FLOSS project, students receive a stipend of USD 1000. We are looking for sponsors to support one or more projects. Please get in touch with the organisers to learn more about our sponsorship program.
• Projects.
  We are looking for interesting Open Source projects which are interested in usability support. We will have a call for projects in February 2008. If you would like to register beforehand, please fill in the OpenUsability project application form.
• Students.
  If you are interested to participate in the Season of Usability 2009, you can register for our newsletter by sending an email to students at openusability org.