OpenWengo Student Project
Summary
OpenWengo is a communication tool that allows to make voice calls and integrates IM contacts. The goal of the student project was to make design changes to the notifications system.
In a 4 month collaboration, Paula Bach, the student intern, presented a notification scheme for incoming calls and tested the existing application along this scheme. She summarised problems of the current version of OpenWengo and derivations from her scheme in a wiki, and after a few weeks, the proposed changes to the notification system were implemented by a developer.
About
Project: OpenWengo. OpenWengo is a softphone which allows you to make free PC to PC video and voice calls, and to integrate all your IM contacts in one place.
Student Intern: Paula Bach, USA. Paula Bach is a PhD Candidate at the Computer-Supported Collaboration and Learning Lab of Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology.
Technical Mentor: Jerome Wagner, France. Jerome Wagner is the lead developer of OpenWengo.
Project Work
Unlike the other student project, the OpenWengo project was not supervised by a usability mentor. Together with Jerome, the lead developer, it was decided that Paula should design the interaction scheme for call notification. To integrate the appropriate platform guidelines into the scheme she created different scenarios of use for Windows, Mac and Linux usage.
The scenarios of use were tested on the three platforms, and Paula came up with concrete issues that had to be fixed. She packed them into small chunks, and desribed for each 1) here is how things work, 2) here is why it's bad, 3) here is how we should change it to make it work better. After a few weeks, the suggested changes got to a developer and were implemented.
Meanwhile Paula began posting on the list when she had rationale for why proposed changes were good or bad. Sometimes the lead dev asked her directly for what she thought. Generally she tried to research the implications for design changes and use rationale that might be the most persuasive. If possible, she would use things like Fitt's law, or suggest how a user might interpret the change.
The greatest challenge in this project was that Paula had to develop her own process to collaborate with the OpenWengo developers. In the other student projects, the usability mentor acted as a mediator, kew how FLOSS projects "tick" and how to present feedback. As Paula worked directly with the developers, she probably got a much deeper comprehension of how usability in FLOSS development works - an insight that was very useful for her PhD thesis which covers this topic.
